Blue Prism: reworking the human-machine dovetail join

Goodness, do you remember (like, inside the last decade) when we as the tech industry were only just getting to grips with automation?

Back in the good old pre-millennial age, we most of considered any reasonable element of robotics, auto-driven mechanisation or automation to be comparatively smart compared to much of what had gone before.

Some of us even remember ‘predictive text’ on the Nokia 3310 mobile handsets as quite cool.

Anyway, that was then and this is now and these days it’s a question of intelligent automation or nothing i.e. plain old automation doesn’t cut it anymore.

Aiming to bolster its name in this space this year is Blue Prism with its intelligent automation products straddling the world of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).

The company’s technology proposition hinges around a suggestion that intelligent automation is an enabler of true digital (and we can’t quite believe we’re using this already-hackneyed expression) transformation, as it helps facilitate a ‘reworking’ of core strategic business initiatives.

Auto-reworking work

Blue Prism’s future vision is focused on orchestrating the work of human employees seamlessly alongside software robots to increase productivity and employee engagement — and, although that (arguably) steps rather to close to sounding like marketing padding, it also does highlight the dovetail point between humans and machines.

In its version 7 product launch completed in early summer 2021, Blue Prism re-architected its platform.

“As we continue to refine Blue Prism offerings and define a new tier of intelligent enterprise automation technology, we have prioritised investment in product development. The release of eight new products followed by the major platform release of Version 7, takes us towards programmable infrastructure, with enhanced cloud offerings and enterprise strategic automation at the core,” said Blue Prism CEO and chairman Jason Kingdon.

Kingdon talks of multi-tasking software robots that automatically scale and carry out end-to-end complex process where automations move us away from current RPA definitions towards an enhanced model of robot productivity.

Detailing automatic scaling

Application building and modelling capabilities in Blue Prism Version 7 have been tweaked for greater visibility and control to make automatic scaling more straightforward.

Blue Prism’s Decipher extracts and organises structured and semi-structured data from business documents. Blue Prism’s Interact simplifies customer communication by providing human to digital workflows. Blue Prism’s Capture – autogenerates all key components necessary to form a process definition document (PDD), giving instant access to process outlines and reduce time to automate.

An expanded API framework allows developers to extend digital worker capabilities with artificial intelligence via direct plug-ins into the wider ecosystem and a choice of applications and technologies.

The company has also built a new secure server-based digital worker architecture with faster control room performance for data at a glance, to make it easier to expand and orchestrate the digital workforce across end-to-end strategic automations.