How a combined platform and robotics center of excellence supports citizen development at Navy Federal Credit Union

When Michael Royston and Kenneth Hearn joined the BPAI (Business Process Automation and Innovation) team - the precursor to their current Automation Center of Excellence - at Navy Federal Credit Union in 2018, it looked a lot different than it does today.

As a group that was new to the concept of a center of excellence, Michael, Kenneth, and their team faced a learning curve when it came to standardizing automations and governing citizen development. They often struggled with the effects of "shadow IT," where citizen developers left the team without educating the group on the ins and outs of automations they'd built - leaving them in a difficult position if automations failed to work properly.

As they gained more experience and adopted new technologies, Michael, Kenneth, and the team became skilled at navigating these challenges. In 2019, they began using the Pega Platform ™ and Pega Robotics, and concurrently established an Automation Center of Excellence to govern all Pega development within the business.

We spoke with Michael and Kenneth at PegaWorld iNspire 2024 to understand more about what they've learned since implementing Pega, and how they've managed to overcome some of their initial challenges. Read on to learn more about their story.

Navy Federal has done quite a lot with Pega. Can you give me a quick snapshot of where you are now with your usage

We purchased Pega Robotics in 2019, and quickly realized the value of utilizing Robot Manager for orchestration. We then brought in the Pega Platform and stood up our own Robot Manager that same year. Today, we have 18 attended RPA (robotic process automation) solutions and 18 unattended RPA solutions, plus Workforce Intelligence deployed on over 15,000 desktops. We estimate we have saved 500,000 FTE hours just from Robotics alone.

One of the secrets to your success has been your combined Platform and Robotics Automation Center of Excellence, which you call ACE. Can you tell us a little about that?

We started the creation of ACE in 2018 and spent a while getting approval and establishing it; it officially operationalized in 2020. Essentially, its function is to provide guidance and oversight to all Pega development done at NFCU.

How is the ACE team organized, and what are the specific functions within the group?

Our framework for ACE details all the recommended and required artifacts for professional and citizen developers, from the ideation phase through production deployment.

• The team requires checkpoints such as intake scoring review, solution design document approval, and code reviews, as well as official code reviews with all stakeholder teams prior to production deployment.
• We also provide additional services such as application onboarding, creating reusable components, design patterns, and performing the role of security champion on dev projects.
• Our team partners with dedicated internal Pega Software Support and Level Three Support teams to create automated DevOps pipelines for all Pega applications.

How does Navy Federal use unattended RPA? What have some of your use cases been?

One of our common use cases for unattended RPA is to build a robotic process as a stand-in for a missing API. To do this, we use a dedicated Pega instance with Robot Manager. Each case needs to have clearly defined basic inputs and outputs and a callback URL so the calling application will be notified when work is completed. Since these solutions are often temporary, we also assign a team member to take responsibility for planning a permanent solution and communicating with the vendor or internal contacts to plan for the long-term replacement.

What about attended RPA? What are some use cases for that?

We tend to use attended RPA as a virtual assistant on employee desktops. We like that the interfaces are versatile and adapt to your needs; we can leverage the Pega Platform as a UI, use a custom UI, or no UI at all. The design is also smart and allows us to keep all business logic in a controller layer for easier reuse.

How have you overcome the issue of shadow IT at your organization?

We have years of experience with shadow IT, and we've found it never works to use a heavy hand to reign it in. It may work temporarily, but it's like pulling weeds; they always come back. Our approach has been to provide Pega technology as a development solution and offer structured support to citizen developers at NFCU. We've also embraced those within the business who show interest and a passion for development by introducing a "Business Developer" title. This legitimizes that hybrid role and also offers the employee a level of professional recognition that their shadow IT usage lacked.

What are some hazards companies implementing robotics need to watch out for?

We had a situation where an enhancement to an automation worked so well and batch processed such a large number of records, it caused a denial-of-service attack. One thing we learned from that is a change to an automation can seem perfectly harmless on the surface, but you often need more visibility to understand the bigger picture and think about the downstream effects and other players involved.

Another thing we've faced and overcome is the issue of citizen developers creating automations and then leaving for another role. This can be a huge problem, because once they leave, no one knows how their automations work and no one is willing to touch them. To address this, we make sure every automation created has a business continuity plan in place to address what needs to happen in the event a bot has issues and the original developer is not available.

Moving forward, what are some of the robotics-related projects you're excited about?

One is creating a strong framework for consistency and enabling reuse. Another is migrating to V22. In the process of working on the migration, we've been meeting with the Pega engineering team and sharing our wish list items, and everything we've asked for has been added. It's exciting to see our feedback incorporated and to know that our years of experience working with robotics will help other users!

There's much more to this story! To watch the full interview with Michael and Kenneth, visit the replay of their PegaWorld iNspire 2024 breakout session here.

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