Last week’s CIOFEST CIO conference included a fireside chat with UiPath founder and CEO Daniel Dines that surfaced an annual 144% customer net retention rate—suggesting customers keep finding new use cases for its software.
The key to successful and on-going RPA (robotic process automation) adoption is close collaboration between IT and the rest of the organization using it.
And that’s from someone who should know: Daniel Dines, the man who created the phenomenon with his firm, UiPath.
Dines–speaking as guest and lead sponsor of the March 14 ‘CIOFEST’ global user conference of CIO membership organization CIONET—says that the main problem he feels UiPath can now help organizations with is opening up a new and better approach to exploiting their data.
“We all know data is in many different systems, but in most systems that data is not in a human-readable format,” he told CIONET founder and MD Henrick Deckers.
“So it’s not easy to understand. It’s very difficult to look at the tables in SAP and understand what’s going on there, for example.
“But where we can help is that vital data has a much better human format if you look at it from the user interface perspective. Business has coded a lot of metadata in the interface that you don’t find at the data level or in the database level, and robots are great at navigating different systems, gathering data from the user interface, and so making it much easier to store it in your new data lake and then allow you to use powerful analytics on that data that makes sense.”
RPA not scaling? Not a technology issue
What role will the CIO play in this scenario? Dines stressed that proper implementation of RPA is absolutely the job of an expert IT leader: “RPA and automation are big enterprise system, this isn’t a simple product to install on your desktop. We try to offer governance tools to prevent you ever building spaghetti automations, so this must run under the governance of a CIO. This is a must.”
But, he added, in the most successful RPA implementations are in his team’s experience always the result of close collaboration with IT and their line of business colleagues. “This technology is the intersection of business and IT and essential both sides collaborate well. It’s also essential to have both a bottom-up and top-down dynamic from IT and users to achieve the velocity to go fast across a big enterprise.
This collaboration, he believes, is also the way that problems some users report on scaling RPA can be solved. “The technology is fully enterprise-ready now, so this is not a technology issue,” he stated. “Yes, this can be a significant deployment and it’s not like when you bring in something like email, or Slack or Teams for you. You have enlist everyone on the enterprise to identify processes that can be subject to automation, which can be a bottleneck but it’s the way you create a pipeline of opportunities, which you then you go after one by one.”
Dines pointed to the fact that UiPath users are proving this is true, as its net retention rate is 144%, indicating existing customers are increasing the adoption of its technology by over 40% year over year.
