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OpusCapita Group is a Finnish company offering financial processes and outsourcing services to medium-sized companies and large corporations. OpusCapita particularly focuses on comprehensive Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash processes. In hopes to stay ahead of the curve in financial process automation, OpusCapita is betting on Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This teaching case presents challenges faced by Mr. Petri Karjalainen, Senior Vice President at OpusCapita Group, who is looking for ways to introduce RPA to the market, and provide added value to new and existing customers.

Organizations facing high risks and operating in purely digital domains, such as computer security and many financial services, must meet two, contradictory goals: they need to identify digital threats at scale and speed while also avoiding errors that result from automated processing. Research on high-reliability organizations has identified multiple challenges in reaching these goals simultaneously, because automation often renders organizations' operations "mindless" and unable to cope gracefully with changing, complex situations characteristic of high-risk domains. In digital operations, a special challenge arises from the "frame problem" connected with the inability of algorithms to adapt to environments not identified within their developers' initial cognitive frames. An exploratory, theory-generating case study was conducted within a computer security company (F-Secure) to examine how organizations acting in digital domains may achieve high reliability by mitigating the frame problem. This article examines digital organizing of the epistemic and pragmatic features of operations, along with arrangements of these features that respond to the frame problem. Collective mindfulness is identified as emerging in such a sociotechnical setting via a carefully layered, systemic constellation of (human) mindful and (digital) mindless operations while the organization's core operations remain digital and algorithmic. The findings point to heretofore unexplored reliability challenges associated with digital organizing, alongside several relevant ways to overcome and/or mitigate them.

The teaching case addresses the governance of robotic process automation at Nordea, a large banking group operating primarily in the Nordic region. Nordea has deployed numerous software robots, for a wide range of business processes, from transaction-processing work and both internal and external reporting all the way to interaction with end users in handling of General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)-related queries. The scene is set with a meeting where three people discuss the current state of robotic process automation implementation at Nordea: Group Head of Robotics Agnieszka Belowska Gosławska, Head of Robotic Process Automation Operations Piotr Stolarczyk and Acting Head of Robotics Execution Jaroslaw Motylewski. The presentation outlines several governance-related issues and decision points that must be addressed in connection with any deployment of robotic process automation at somewhat large scale within a company. The key issues are related to the software’s development and maintenance, robotic process automation governance and IT infrastructure. Students who have worked through the case should be able to (1) describe archetypal and hybrid governance modes for robotic process automation and (2) evaluate their advantages and disadvantages for solid infrastructure and effective software development and maintenance.

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine what kinds of capabilities are required by process industry companies as they move toward servitization. The authors proceed in two steps. First, the authors explore the capabilities needed in servitization with a qualitative multiple case study. Second, the authors link the identified capabilities to the servitization steps that were derived from prior literature. Design/methodology/approach Based on earlier servitization literature, the authors build a five-step servitization model for industrial companies. Then, drawing on the empirical study consisting of three focus group sessions with three case companies and 20 interviews in 14 case companies, the authors identify 14 servitization capabilities and link them to the servitization steps. Findings The study reveals how dynamic capabilities are required in servitization. In contrast to operational capabilities, which are geared toward enabling firms to make a living in the present, dynamic capabilities extend or modify operational capabilities in response to market changes. Based on the empirical study, the authors were able to identify dynamic capabilities for all five steps of servitization: identification of current services and customer needs, determination of a service strategy, creation of new business models and pricing logics, improvements in capabilities, and, ultimately, management services as a separate function. Research limitations/implications The current study is exploratory in nature and the number of empirical observations is limited to 14 industrial companies operating in the process industry. Practical implications Most importantly, in servitization, companies need dynamic capabilities to transform their operating capabilities in sales and marketing as well as in quantifying and communicating the value created for customers. Originality/value The study is the first one to make a link between the capabilities needed and the various stages of servitization and also the first to study the specific context of process industry companies.