Managing risks in the digital age

DIGITAL technology is well recognised as an important enabler for innovation. Digital transformation brings forth unmatched opportunities and capabilities for growth and value creation. Chief experience officers are consistently launching new products and services by leveraging new-wave digital technologies such as robotics, chatbots, cognitive, blockchain and cloud.

Against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, one such enabler, which has seen a proliferation of adoption across numerous industries, is Robotics Process Automation (RPA). This can be in its native form as well as coupled with AI and cognitive solutions (RCA). Robots allow businesses to be more responsive, cost effective, compliant and efficient. We are already entering an era where BOTs are doing intelligent work while building efficiencies.

In the most recent Deloitte’s Annual Global RPA Survey, payback of RPA adoption was reported to be less than 12 months, with an average 20% of full-time equivalent capacity provided by robots. It’s also found that 78% of those who have already implemented RPA expect to significantly increase investment in RPA over the next three years.

In 2020 alone, the Malaysian government had allocated over RM550 million to provide smart automation matching grants to 1,000 manufacturing and 1,000 services companies, to automate their business processes. To encourage the small and medium enterprise (SME) sector to further embrace e-commerce, the government has also set aside another RM150 million for Budget 2021 for finance SMEs’ automation initiatives under the SME Digitalization Grant Scheme and Automation Grants.

While the investments and adoption rate for RPA is encouraging and it is clear that the technology greatly simplifies and make our lives more efficient, RPA also opens up new risks to the business environment. Organisations should thus focus on managing risks, to ensure sustainability.

RPA brings its own inherent risks as well the ones, resulting from the business environment it automates in. The Deloitte RPA Risk framework provides effective risk management and monitoring of six key risk domains. Each of these domains would help strengthen security and controls in an RFP environment.

It is essential for an organisation to build a secure BOT strategy prior to embarking on its robotics journey and have the necessary controls embedded to manage risks throughout the implementation lifecycle. With constantly evolving risk and threat to the technology environment, this becomes more crucial.

This article was contributed by Deloitte Malaysia risk advisory executive director Shahariz Abdul Aziz.

Source: The Sun Daily