Group Workshop as a “Human-Centered Approach” for Identification and Selection of Business Processes for Robotic Process Automation

Robotic process automation (RPA) has been rapidly diffusing in organizations to automate monotonous business processes. Nevertheless, only about half of such projects are successful, as organizations struggle to identify simple yet impactful processes. Existing approaches for selecting business processes for RPA include process mining and individual interviews. These have been often charged to be time-consuming, unsystematic, overly complex, and dependent primarily on individual perspectives. In this empirical study, we explore the deployment of group intelligence to select business processes suitable for RPA. We investigate whether and how a group of relevant actors can jointly generate ideas, evaluate them, and select the most salient processes for RPA automation. We draw on the design science to develop a human-centered artifact that fulfills actors’ needs—a group workshop for RPA identification and selection—and to assess such artifacts. The workshop incorporates elements of the business process management lifecycle and nominal brainstorming. The workshop is designed by drawing on the recommendations of the existing relevant literature. A real-life group-based RPA identification and selection workshop experiment was conducted with a group of employees of an audit firm located in the Netherlands. A follow-up survey and interviews were carried out with the participants to evaluate the workshop, indicating an overall positive experience and suitability to effectively identify relevant processes. This study proposes a new systematic group approach for identifying and selecting business processes for RPA, which could be applied in a variety of contexts and organizations. It also puts forward a comprehensive agenda for future research and practice.