IBA GROUP BLOG

When I recently visited IBA Group in Minsk I was expecting to hear about their Cloud Computing solutions and some of their more recent developments in Machine Learning, but I was surprised to hear exactly how developed their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) expertise is today.

Last year the analyst firm HfS Research published a cautionary article on Robotic Process Automation (RPA). They warned that the technology and outsourcing market was hyping RPA beyond what it could possibly achieve – the talk of RPA changing the world is all hype.

The business journals used to say that outsourcing and offshoring was replacing the need for companies to hire people. Now it’s the robots that are supposed to be taking our jobs. Business journals and commentators across the world are suggesting that a wave of automation driven by smart Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems will largely replace the need for workers.

The difference between enterprise IT and consumer IT has been blurred in recent years. It used to be that managers used Blackberries as their mobile device of choice because it worked better with email than any other handset – now Android and IOS are dominant for both enterprise and consumer use.

The Big Data market has transformed how most IT services are bought and sold. Often the customer is a business leader, rather than the CIO, and services are already available, rather than needing to be designed from the ground up.

Think about the consumer technology that you regularly use today. You probably have a smart phone, maybe a Kindle or other e-reader, maybe an Apple Watch or similar device that can access information from your phone.

Have you ever stopped to appreciate just how much data we are creating today?

Mobile devices, mobile technology and mobile applications are widely different. Every now and then, we see Android smartphones of various designs and sizes that are extensively used mainly for communication, entertainment, and sharing in social networks.