Intelligent Process Automation

January 2022

Welcome to The Cirrostratus Group January newsletter.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been talked about for awhile but it is evolving into Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) as Artificial Intelligence (AI) is incorporated into business process automation. In this month's newsletter I talk about IPA and some information on the technology and the applications.

Making your SaaS onboarding process totally self-service is a worthwhile goal. From the information below even if you think your application is too complex there is a lot to be learned from understanding self service on boarding concepts.

One of the challenges of AI that I've talked about in previous newsletters is the issue of trust in the AI solution. MIT has been doing research in this area and automating natural language descriptions of neural networks seems like a great approach and is outlined in this article. If you understand what each part of the neural network is doing you are more likely to be able to trust the result.

Paul Ressler

The Cirrostratus Group

Intelligent Process Automation

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is generally meant to be used for defined, rule-based business processes. Intelligent Process Automation (IPA) is used for more complex operations that in addition to RPA technology can benefit from the use of machine learning, natural language processing, predictive analytics and can handle a wider range of data formats. A good way to think about the difference is that IPA is an extension of RPA. This TechTarget article has some good definitions of both technologies.

The 2021 Gartner Magic Quadrant for RPA is a good resource on providers of RPA and Gartner talks about some of the advanced features which show the blending of RPA into IPA.

Some excellent examples of use cases are listed by one of the providers of IPA software, Indico. Eweek also published a good outline of the trends on IPA for 2022 and talk about use cases and which industries are adopting solutions.

I think that IPA technology is an excellent technology to consider for your SaaS application, it isn't just enterprise businesses that have workflow challenges, small and medium sized businesses have them too.

Self Service On boarding for SaaS Applications

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Openview Partners recently published a guide to self-service on boarding for SaaS applications. You can think of self service as a process to convert freemium customers to paying customers or converting trial customers to customers. Although many complex SaaS applications may have significant challenges along the path there are a lot of good ideas that can be used to help smooth the on boarding process even if it isn't totally self-service.

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