 from the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back from the Bellagio in Las Vegas. theCUBE is live at UiPath, Forward 4. I'm Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We're going to be talking about roadblocks to automation and how to navigate around them. Joining us next is Perna Dodopanini, expert associate partner at Bain and Company. Perna, welcome to the program. Thanks Lisa, happy to be here. Talk to us about some of the use cases that Bain is working on with UiPath and then we'll dig into some of those roadblocks that you guys have uncovered. Yes, this started a few months ago where we are working with Brandon, who's the product lead on the UiPath side. We wanted to understand what's the state of citizen development and what are the blockers and how we should both from the product side but also on the automation journey side. We need to dig deeper and understand where each of the clients and the employees are going through the journey together. And if you look at it from the citizen developer perspective, what are some of those roadblocks? There are a few. So before we go to the roadblocks, there are three main concerns or I would say critical groups that are involved in being successful with automation. The organization or BU leaders, the IT and employees. So each of the groups have different perceptions on misconceptions or perceptions on benefits of automation and how to go about it. The blockers that we have seen were three sets of blockers. The first is cognitive, where employees are unaware of automation or the benefits of automation. And the second one is more organizational, where organization leaders and how they feel about automation or how they think about employees when we introduce automation to them. One part of that is there's a misconception with organization leaders that employees are fearful of job loss when you introduce automation. What we have seen in our research is it's completely the opposite of employees are eager to adopt automation if given an opportunity. They are willing to upskill themselves and they're willing to save the time so that they can spend that on critical value added activities for their customers in the process. And a third blocker that we have seen is more on the product side, where some of the employees that we talk to as much as progress has been made by RPA vendors and low-code, no-code vendors, it's still these tools are not intuitive, user-friendly for business users. They still feel they need to go through some training programs and have a better user-friendly interfaces. What's the entry point to an organization? First time I ever heard of RPA years and years and years ago was at a CFO conference, okay? So that's cool. It seems like at Forward 4 there's a lot more CIO presence here and is that relatively new or did I just miss it before? It is relatively new. So when we looked at in the past few years, the entry point has been someone in finance or IT has heard about RPA, the benefits of it. They went and bought a handful of licenses and then they went and implemented it but it's just a handful of processes. It's not organizational-wide. It has been mostly on a smaller sub-scale of processes and projects. Now that organizations are realizing, employees are asking and we are slowly growing up with automation COEs. It's now intersecting with the CXO level of if it has to intersect with your, if you want to reinvent your business through automation, it has to come from the CXO level and that's where we are seeing more and more CIOs being involved in decisions on automation journeys, the technologies they have to buy and adopt for the business processes. So IT can be an enabler of course but also sometimes IT can be a blocker and certainly from security standpoint, governance, et cetera. And so one of the things that we heard today in the keynotes was you don't want to automate. The CIO, he or she owns this application portfolio and everybody wants to do new projects because that's the fun stuff. We heard from one CFO, yeah, you add up all the NPV from the new projects. It's bigger than the valuation of the company, right? But the CIO is stuck having to manage the infrastructure and all the processes around the existing application portfolio. One of the things I heard today was don't automate an application or a process that you're trying to retire because we never get rid of stuff in IT. So I wonder should automation, like an enterprise wide automation, should there be kind of an application rationalization exercise or a business process rationalization coincident with that initiative? No, absolutely. I think that was one of the blockers that we've seen, like some of the misconceptions and some of the blockers. When IT looks at it for them, they consider like you're bringing all these tools. You're asking business users who haven't been trained in technology or programming. You're asking them to build these automations. So one, they have to manage with all the applications and the tool sprawl that happens. And to manage these automations after business users have either left the company or moved on. So it is essential for them to think through and provide a streamlined tool set on two aspects. One, IT needs to be, as you started off, IT needs to be an enabler to provide them the specific tools that they can, they have already blessed, they have curated it, which are ready for business consumption. The second part IT can also do is providing collaboration platforms so that business users can learn from each other and from IT so that they can, one, are developing the right processes with the right methodology that is governed by IT and no security or data governance issues come through. One of the things that you mentioned in terms of the three roadblocks that you uncovered was that you were surprised that the results of the research showed that in fact, employees are really wanting to adopt automation. In fact, I think the stat is 86% of employees want automation but only 30% of leaders are giving them the opportunity to use that. That's a big gap. Why do you think that is? So a few things, as we talked about the three constituents that you have. One is organization leaders. If you consider from them, their view is their employees are not capable of adopting or building on the automations using these tools. And they need technical skills. But all the automation vendors have made progress. And if you look at the tools today, they're much more user-friendly and business users are willing to adopt. The second part is we talked about is the fear of job loss from the employee standpoint. Whereas employees are looking at it as an opportunity for them to upskill but also eliminate the pain points that they have today in their day-to-day activities using the automation tools. And for them, this is helping them spend the time with the customers where it matters on critical value-added activities versus going through the repetitive process of the journey. And the third part we talked about earlier with IT. IT has this notion that they need to build and develop anything technical. Business users will not be able to build or manage. And they're also worried about the governance, the security. And the third part which you brought up earlier is that tools sprawl. It's like we need to manage these volume of tools that are coming in, which is only adding to their plate of already busy workforce. I have one of those It Depends questions and it's a good consultant, I'm sure you'll say. Well, it depends. But are there patterns, like best practice or even more than best practice, are there sort of playbooks, if you will, and patterns, I'm sure it's situational. But are you seeing patterns emerge where you can say, okay, this sort of category should approach it this way. Here's another one different. Maybe it's a department bottoms up, top down. Can you help us sort of squint through that? Yeah, so in terms of approaches, like at least up till now, the prevalent thing that is happening is like COEs went and buy some licenses. They talk about like opportunities that they have. So it's more of top down driven. Like COE driven agenda. What we are seeing now, especially with citizen automation or democratization of automation is, there's a new approach of including employees into the journey and bringing the bottoms up approach. So there's a happy path where you marry up the top down approach with bottoms up. And one, you will find opportunities which are organizational wide with the BU leaders. And they are ones which are on the long tail of opportunities, which employees feel the pain, but IT or COE doesn't have the time to come and implement or automate these activities. Considering like one part we have seen which is like increasingly helpful for people who have done this properly is including employees. And one thing we talked yesterday is invest in employees. They consider automation as investment in employees rather than something they're doing to employees. So it's kind of collaborating with employees to make progress, which seems to be helping evangelize and also benefit with automation. How have the events of the last 18 months impacted this as well? We've seen so much acceleration and the mandate for automation. What are some of the things that you've seen? Sure, so for us, like even before the pandemic, we have seen in our research, so like more than close to 50% of the organizations that they started the automation journey were unable to achieve the savings or targets that they set themselves for whatever the success factors are, which had a few reasons. One, they didn't have the organizational support, nor they were taking the end to end journey or a customer journey to figure out like what are these big opportunities that they can go through? And they haven't included employees and to figure out what are the major pain points to go through the journey. One thing it was clear was with COVID, no one expected this kind of disruption and a pandemic. There are a lot of offshore centers or like pretty much different geographies got disconnected from the work that's being done. You still need to support your customers. There is still a higher demand. What do you do? It's not like you can scale up your employees in a pandemic. That's where like we have seen increasing push towards automation and technology to see that can help and support and scale in a pandemic environment and also help your customers in the journey. So in your opinion, has automation become a mandate as a result of the pandemic? I would say, yeah, I would consider it's more of like now it's become, I would say, one, a competitive differentiator to say like, I needed to keep my lights on and resiliency, but also the companies have done really well, they saw the advantage and they weathered the pandemic better with their customers. Now they use that as a platform to create a competitive differentiation against their peers and push things forward. One of the things we heard today in the keynotes is you got to think about, in my words, the life cycle. You don't just put in the bot and then just leave it alone. You really have to think through that and that seems to me to be where you would help customers think through how to get the most return out of their investment. UiPath product company, they get great. And so you talk about the value layer that you guys bring. So for us, it's like when we talk to mostly we bring in from the business side of the house to understand what are the key drivers that you need to work on. I mean, even before we talk about technology, we talk about let's understand from the customer standpoint, what is your customer journey end to end? And look through that journey lens and let's take the process end to end. Let's look at redesigning process and making it more optimal and streamlined. And where technology fits in, that's when we talk about like if it is an RPA or if it's a UiPath platform that can support, let's go through that journey versus taking the tool itself as the solution and trying to find every nail that you can hit, which usually is not sustainable to your point. Like we need to think through the whole life cycle, make sure this is going to last or if you are retiring like in the CIO panel that was a discussion where we need to think through when we are going to retire and make sure like we are in that journey versus building all these automations or bringing all these tools and leaving them alone for IT to manage long-term. And again, last 18 months again, question about the reactions catalyzed, facilitated. Thinking about those three roadblocks, the cognitive roadblocks, the organizational roadblocks and particularly what I'm interested in this question and product, what are some of the conversations that you've seen or trends that you've seen to help those organizations better understand how to collaborate with each other so that what they're not doing is putting in RPA point tools but really starting to build the right part of a nomination and journey into their digital transformation plans? Yeah, I mean in a way to, again I'll go back to the three conscience that we talked earlier, right? It's IT can only go so far and automate so much because they haven't seen the business lens of like how the processes are, what they have to do end to end which is where you need to involve the business leaders who can give you that view from the business side and employees who are seeing the work day to day and where they can eliminate the pain points. So the organizations that are successful they are creating a collaborative environment between the three groups to push things forward. Yeah, you have to have that collaboration. That's critical. Otherwise that's probably one of the roadblockers as well. Yeah, absolutely. Where does automation fit? I mean you're obviously heavily into automation but think about the Bain portfolio, the boardroom discussions. Where does automation fit? I mean, there's security, there's how do we embed AI into our business? How do we sassify our business? How do we transform digitally? Where does automation fit in that whole discourse? So I think automation is like at the heart of digital transformation. The part which we have seen where the gap is is not taking the business angle and actually thinking through the process end to end versus picking up a tool and trying to go solve a problem or find a problem to solve. And that's where we think in our discussions with boardrooms it's more of let's think of how you want to reimagine your company or how you want to be more competitive looking into the future. And walk back from that standpoint and then chart a path from, I mean the way we call it is a future back, like where you are today and now let's go forward to what your end state is and where technology broadly or digital tools and where automation fits in the process. How do you see what UI Path is talking about at this conference, the announcements from yesterday? There's a lot of people here which is fantastic. How do you see what they're announcing, the vision that they set out a couple of years ago that they're now delivering on how is that a facilitator of organizations removing those roadblocks? Because as you said, automation is a huge competitive differentiator these days. And if we've learned nothing in the last 19 months it's you got to be careful because there's always a competitor in the rear view mirror who might be smaller, faster, more agile, ready to take your place. Yeah, so like a few things that we've seen in the product roadmap that UI Path talked about is they are providing the collaboration platform or tools where the IT business owners can work through. Like for example, Automation Hub is what they've talked at length yesterday is that's the platform where business users can provide their ideas. Like you provide process mining tools which can capture the process and the business users understand the process and they are the ones who are putting in an opportunity on the roadmap. So you have now a platform where all the ideas are being cataloged. And once you implement, they are being tracked on the Automation Hub. So that is providing a platform for everyone to collaborate together. The second one which Brandon talked yesterday is the tool itself for StudioX when we are talking about citizen developers or employees trying to use and make it more user friendly is that's where the StudioX which is providing that UI interface which is easy, intuitive for business users to build basic automations and try to take that long tail of opportunities that we talked about. So all these tools are coming together as one platform play which UI path has been talking about all through the conference and that is critical for everyone to collaborate to make a progress versus only thinking it's an IT's job to implement the automation opportunities. That collaboration is business critical these days, right? Purna, thank you for joining Dave and me and the program talking about some of the roadblocks that you've uncovered but also some of the ways that organizations in any industry can navigate around them and really empower those employees who want automation in their jobs. We appreciate your insights. Happy to be here, thanks for having us. You're welcome. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin live in Las Vegas at UI Path Forward 4. We'll be right back with our next guest.