Governance and Transparency

One of the crucial elements in our framework is the enhanced transparency, which is achieved by having a completely open prioritisation-system, in which all the different business units can inspect proposed projects from the other busi-ness units. As our system is built upon a model of Computerised Decision Sup-port System with a foundation of AHP framework, it is simple to allow all the users of the system to see each other’s opportunities and recent projects.

Through our interviews, we sought to understand a successful governance and transparency model further as well as validate or invalidate some of our initial ideas from the first design of the artefact. Our empirical evidence in this phase

showed that the constructed model is highly relevant and on the right track.

The RPA Experts from KPMG currently used systems that reminded them of our system when rating processes in organisations, although they often used Excel instead. (KPMG, Mikael, Appendix H)

In the previous artefact iteration, we assumed that due to the broad usage of ITIL and other governance systems, the documentation conditions would be of quite a high quality, so that the experts that had been selected to score the dif-ferent processes would be fairly capable of judging the process with a moderate degree of work. We now understand that this is a naive assessment of the current Documentation Quality.

"The current documentation quality is a bit, ehh... You always have to doc-ument things again, and I have never been a place where we haven’t ended up doing that. Of course, it is possible to use the current process description to evaluate."

KPMG, Kristoffer, Appendix I

Based on this, we would have to allow more time for the process-consultant to go out and understand the current process, to ensure that the process is capable of being scored. Therefore we do also have to introduce a new formal meeting, that will be further described in Subsection 6.3.3.

The current artefact has been based quite a lot on quantitative numbers such as the current amount of work being done in the process, as well as the workload to complete before a new robot can take over for the current employee. However, another critical aspect is the importance of securing organisational likeability and satisfaction. We have included this in the first artefact, as that is in line with the theoretical groundwork that has been described in Chapter 2.

During this iteration, we noticed the informants had some degree of disagree-ment on the necessity of including these ’softer’ parameters in the model.

"Let us say that you are in a compliance-department, then it is probably not important that they are saving FTE’s, as you have probably budgeted to do that, but the most important thing is that the quality is good. I see great value in aligning the robot to the KPI and the vision for the department or the entire organisation, but that is also something that you have included in Customer Satisfaction."

KPMG, Mikael, Appendix H

"I do not think it [Organisational Vision] is important. I do not think that it [Organisational Vision] is something that should be used as a definitive fact for selecting processes in the organisation."

KPMG, Kristoffer, Appendix I

Due to the disagreement between our informants but the clear backing in the IT governance and decision structure literature, we included these parameters as well as the leading influence in the selection process. The main reason is that a higher degree of organisational alignment correlates with a high degree of sup-port from the organisational leadership in continuing the automation process.

One of the advantages of our system is the added transparency. During the inter-views, we examined the informant’s view of the system, which confirmed that the full transparency between different business units and across the entire or-ganisation would be highly beneficial for innovation and break-up of silos. We have therefore decided to keep the innovation in the system, but moreover cre-ated another screen in the system, in which the actors will be able to see previ-ously finished projects, as a method to find inspiration.

"It will be able to create some inspiration for the others, where they might see something interesting and says ’Oh, I might be able to use this.’ The most important thing is to create as much hype as possible, so if you see that someone made a cool robot somewhere. I believe that some of the worst things, is where you have some silos, where you are within the same organ-isation but in different departments, and then you are doing some RPA that is completely isolated. They are not sharing any information, and you are currently spending time-solving a task that someone completed five months ago somewhere else, so it is extremely important to knowledge-share, and this can create it."

KPMG, Mikael, Appendix H

This quote also supports our assertion that the current process in LEO Pharma in which every department is managing their RPA efforts can be harming for devel-opment, innovation and idea-generation, as they are not able to share knowledge with each other, but are instead in silos. This is further substantiated by our inter-views with LEO Pharma, in which they were working on things that they further down the development phase, discovered that another department had already begun building. (LEO Pharma, Jesper, Appendix D)

Issues with implementation in public organisations

The literature on implementation of other generic models and systems demon-strates that there is often a lot more resistance and a more limited possibility of success when implementing in public organisations compared to private organi-sations. We are aware of these concerns and have, therefore, further investigated challenges regarding the implementation of our framework in the public sector.

"You could implement it, but you have to pay attention to the things in the system, if it should be all of the departments and a central CoE, which would be a good idea. (...) It’s not more obvious in the private than the public."

KPMG, Kristoffer, Appendix I

"I believe that you should rate a process the same way[as the private organi-sations], but it is being run a bit differently, it’s more centralised regarding the purchases and so forth."

KPMG, Mikael, Appendix H

Based on the above quotes from our informants, we will further pay attention to this in the next design phase, but for now, we have confirmed that there is still a high potential in implementing the framework in both public and private organisations, but that we do have to be aware of particular challenges according to the literature.