The dark side of robotic process automation

Overview

Pandemics such as COVID 19 have forced organisations to pursue hyper-automation to maintain operational sustainability. Many organisations are keen to adopt Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to dramatically improve operational efficiency. However, evidence to date highlighted various associated challenges associated with adoption of RPA in organisations.

Furthermore, recent surveys by consultant organisations found a high RPA project fail rate and their inability to meet the expected return on investment.

Research activities

The tasks include a systematic literature review to collect, collate and synthesis high quality published material on the RPA failure factors to build a conceptual framework, and collection of primary data to verify the framework. The outcomes are expected to document and categorise failure factors within different organisational contexts such as health, education and retail.

Outcomes

This project aims to analyse the socio-technical factors and their interrelationship to discover factors leading to RPA failure and negative consequences of RPA on organisations. The project will provide novel insights on human-bot relationship as well as guidelines for practitioners to help build strategies for effective implementation of RPA.

Skills and experience

• literature search
• academic writing
• ability to learn qualitative data analysis software (NVivo)
• time management.

Keywords

• robotic process automation
• critical factors

Contact

Contact the supervisor for more information.