RPA is often billed as a mechanism to bolster return on investment or reduce costs. However, this is not necessarily the best use of RPAs. CIOs should consider using RPAs to improve customer experience instead. For instance, the aviation industry employ a myriad of customer service agents, yet customers continue to be put on hold indefinitely to have their call fielded. A chatbot could alleviate some of that wait. A virtual agent can be deployed and offer numerous benefits. There is no downtime, sick leave or poor attitude, and clients can enjoy a consistent,professional level of service.

The failure of many implementations fail can be attributed to the poor management of design and change In a bid to deploy quickly, some companies overlook communication exchanges between the various bots, which has the potential to disrupt a business process. One should consider the operating model design before implementation. CIOs should have a clear idea of how they expect various bots to work together. Sometimes, CIOs also neglect to negotiate the impacts new operations will have on an organisation's business processes. CIOs must hence do forward planning and take this into account to avoid business disruption.

Another problem that surfaces in RPA is the failure to anticipate and plan for certain roadblocks. By way of illustration, an employee of an organisation changed the company’s password policy. However, no one programmed the bots to adjust to the new changes, resulting in lost data. CIOs must constantly check for chokepoints where their RPA solution can get bogged down. At the bare minimum, they should install a monitoring and alert system to alert them to hiccups that impact performance. Ultimately, CIOs must remain in command and retain control, rather than adopt a hands-free approach in project governance.

Successful RPA implementations, it has been observed, include a centre of excellence staffed by people who are responsible for making efficiency programs a success within the organisation. However, not every organisation has the budget to make this a reality. The RPA centre of excellence develops business cases, calculating potential cost optimisation and ROI, and measures progress against those goals. Typically, it is a fairly small and nimble group which scales with the technology staff whose focus is on the actual implementation of automation. No matter the industry IT leaders should look for opportunities and understand whether RPA will be transformative for their businesses.

The entire development life cycle must be automated by CIOs, or they risk killing their bots during a major launch. This sounds like something that CIOs would easily remember to do, but many do not make it a part of their process.”

It is possible to derive quick gains with RPA, but driving RPA to run at scale is a different matter altogether. There are several reasons for RPA disruptions. Mostly, they stem from poor management of expectations. Vendors overpromise when they make bold claims and implementation consultants have not been particularly helpful in this regard. It is thus crucial for CIOs to approach RPAs with a cautiously optimistic mindset. When CIOs are able to keep an open eye, they will generally be a lot happier with the result.

COOs who had initially bought RPAs hit a roadblock in the implementation phase. Consequently, they had to seek IT expertise to resolve these issues,according to Viadro. Currently, there are "citizen developers" who lack technical expertise but are using cloud software to implement RPA right in their business unitsOften, the CIO tends to intervene and put a stop to it. Experts agree that business heads must involve IT from the outset to ensure they get the required resources.

Large entities, such as a bank, deploying thousands of bots to automate manual data entry or to monitor software operations accumulates a massive amount of data. This potentially baits CIOs and their business peers into an unfortunate scenario where they are looking to leverage on the data. Such organisations commonly make the mistake of running ML on the data their bots generate, then implement a chatbot on the front to enable users to more easily query the data. In effect, the RPA project has transformed into an ML project that has not been properly scoped as an ML project. Consequently, CIOs find it difficult to track the projects development. His recommendation is for CIOs to consider RPA as a long-term arc, rather than as piecemeal projects that evolve into something unwieldy.

There are lot of challenges in governance related to instantiating a single bot in environment, let alone thousands. A client in a major organisation spent several meetings trying to determine whether their bot was male or female. While it was a valid gender question, one must also consider human resources, ethics and other areas of compliance for the business.

Enticed by the prospect of introducing shiny new solutions, some organisations are so focused on implementation that they fail to keep HR apprised, which can create some nightmarish scenarios for employees whose routines and workflows are disrupted by the change Even as CIOs implement RPAs, they should not forget that people come first.