Identifying the Socio-Human Inputs and Implications in Robotic Process Automation (RPA): A Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract

Recent studies show that the success rate of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) projects is between 50 and 70%. In cases where they are not successful, most failures are caused by organizational factors, i.e., people and their social environment. People in the organization have a significant influence on the success of a RPA project. Likewise, the imple mentation of RPA will bring some implications to them as well. This research is a preliminary study on visualization socio-human implica tions (VoSHI) in the RPA projects. As one of the office automation tech nologies, the application of RPA provides economic benefits and social implications. Unfortunately, most studies highlight the benefits and lack discussions on the impact of RPA on humans. This paper presents a systematic mapping study to analyze the current state-of-the-art on this topic, recognizing the socio-human implications of RPA implementations described in the literature. The research analyzed 56 primary studies selected from both academic digital libraries and grey literature. The results showed 16 positive and 6 negative implications of RPA imple mentations for humans and their social environment. Furthermore, this research also found 6 positive and 13 negative inputs contributed by humans, which can influence RPA implementations.