[Edited July 25th to reflect Mobile Solutions’ current public-facing offerings]
Key Takeaway: Mobile Solutions is providing Robotic Process Automation for Managed Mobility Services with a focus on mid-market enterprises and organizations. This capability provides Mobile Solutions with a starting point for handling basic service orders.
On July 10th, Mobile Solutions announced the launch of two Robotic Process Automation (RPA) assistants named Maxine and Maximus Brain that are assisting with service orders entered into Mobile Solutions’ mobility management platform, MAX.
Maxine serves as the conductor that manages ticket queues and identifies the tickets that will be supported through Robotic Process Automation. Maximus serves as the worker that works the tickets and actually does the work for basic service tickets. Mobile Solutions also plans to execute on developing additional Robotic Process Automation capabilities over time.
Amalgam Insights takes the perspective that these RPA capabilities could potentially serve as a differentiator for the Managed Mobility Services (MMS) market as the majority of its competitors servicing mid-market and enterprise clients are still largely dependent on human agents to handle all service orders. Over time, Amalgam Insights believes that Managed Mobility Services organizations continuing to rely on human labor for low-level service orders processing and execution will fall behind their automated peers from a service level perspective and be left less able to support strategic mobility decisions such as Internet of Things support, artificial intelligence, end-user security, and cloud access and compliance.
As technology challenges and needs continue to progress, it is in the interest of all mid-market and enterprise IT organizations to seek an MMS vendor with both RPA capabilities and a roadmap for future RPA functionalities to ensure that mobility continues to be managed at scale and client organizations are best supported by MMS vendor efforts. Associated with this observation on RPA, Amalgam Insights provides the caveat that Robotic Process Automation is best suited for relatively standard order processes and may not be available for organizations with complex or non-standard service order workflows.
Recommendations:
Amalgam Insights’ top recommendations to mid-market and enterprise organizations are two-fold.
First, mid-market and enterprise IT organizations should be looking at RPA to solve easily automated tickets and processes, either by building themselves or working with managed services providers servicing various aspects of IT. Because managed service providers work with hundreds or thousands of clients at once, they are incentivized to create RPA that can work at massive scale. In this context, Amalgam Insights believes that Mobile Solutions is potentially taking an important step in being relatively early to market in pursuing RPA for managed mobility services offered to the mid-market.
Second, organizations seeking to implement RPA for enterprise mobility and other technology use cases are urged to standardize basic service orders, requests, and processes and to wrap compliance and security efforts around the process rather than trying to fully integrate compliance, governance, and security within the execution of a process. By doing so, forward-facing IT organizations make themselves better positioned to adopt RPA and increase the productivity of their help desk and support staff as well as their outsourcing and services vendors.