Nichols College, a private institution of higher learning in Dudley, announces the expansion of its prestigious Center for Intelligent Process Automation program with the debut of a new research fellowship program designed to pave the way for the next generation of process automation (RPA) developers.

  The first two fellows, Kiernan Gilmurray and Tyler Krimmel (Toronto, Canada) have already embarked on this as they study to innovate the future of work within the Industrial Revolution 4.0.  

  Unlike any program currently offered in higher-level academia today, the student-run CIPA is the result of a ground-breaking partnership between the business education specialists at Nichols College and the internationally recognized tech leaders at NICE to bring Robotic Process Automation (RPA) training and implementation to business at every scale. Designed to take the program to new heights, the research fellowship was implemented to contribute to the school’s intellectual life and support the mission of the CIPA: to support global digital transformation by enabling participation and accessibility for all stakeholders.

  Having already welcomed its first two fellows this semester, Gilmurray and Krimmel have hit the ground running. Working directly with CIPA faculty on extensive research projects, these two brilliant minds are currently exploring the much-debated process of citizen development, which enables non-IT employees to become software developers. They are also working to identify innovative, yet effective practices for using RPA for business analysis.

  Glenn M. Sulmasy, president of Nichols College, said, “As technology becomes more accessible and digital transformation becomes a necessity for innovation and marketplace success, the role of citizen developer has emerged to allow business users to take greater control over the changes rather than relying solely on IT departments to generate software solutions for business. Through this fellowship program, our hope is to attract the best and brightest within the industry to help us identify best practices and improvements in business analysis. In doing so, we’ll have the ability to identify automation candidates earlier, confidently work to define needs, scenarios, and exceptions to be automated, and establish a living repository of use cases to expedite future automations. These activities will help to reduce the barrier of entry to automation technologies and make the pathway to automation adoption less frightening.”

  Bringing more than 25 years of experience to the fellowship program, Gilmurray currently serves as an enterprise automation lead at Rapid7, a leading cyber security company. Blending his extensive background in driving business transformation programs using digital technology, intelligent automation, data analytics, social media and RPA, Gilmurray is focused on working with industry leaders to investigate the competing perspectives on the efficacy of citizen development while also working to successfully adopting new approach that best aligns with the industry’s constantly changing organizational strategy and goals.

  The other fellowship is led by Krimmel, a professor at George Brown College in Toronto with more than fifteen years of experience designing and delivering training in government, academic, and corporate settings. Focused on supporting the CIPA mission of pairing business partners with Nichols’ students, Krimmel has already supported the CIPA team in establishing a baseline approach to conducting business analysis in support of RPA initiatives. Through his research, he will support the team in optimizing the approach, while also tracking the project conditions and details that may impact the requirements delivery and solution definition. His findings will be shared with industry stakeholders to educate and support the use of RPA to address business needs.

  For more information about the CIPA research fellowship, visit https://cipa.nichols.edu/news/cipa-research-fellowship-program/. For more information about the Center for Intelligent Process Automation, visit https://cipa.nichols.edu/.