[eksemplar]

I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry?

I work in the Danish public sector, and we’re sold tech by consultants who hype politicians and upper management, both ares with very little technical understanding. But while they don’t understand what tech is, they do understand change management, and if there isn’t a proven benefit, they won’t buy the hype.

We’re doing a lot of RPA these days, and from a technical standpoint that’s really fucking stupid. An API would be a gazillion times better than a screen scraping macro. In reality, however, we run 370 different IT systems and the truth is that a lot of them won’t have a decent API in the next 20 years, if ever. So while RPA is really stupid technically, it has immense value on the business end because it automated shit we couldn’t automate otherwise.

The reason I mention RPA is that I asked my engineers if it was worth looking into about 3 years ago, and they gave me a straight no. So we didn’t pay it attention until our CEO asked me what RPA projects we were doing after having attended a Deloitte conference on the business application of RPA in the public sector.

Blockchain doesn’t have a use case, and that means it won’t sell, even if it’s hyped to non-tech people.

You do see a few public block chain projects, but they are mostly poc’s that never lead anywhere and they are all run by in house enthusiasts, who were “allowed” to “run with it as long as you keep doing your regular work as well” because allowing your workforce to play with their ideas is motivational, even if it’s really just a waste of time.

[simias]

>I wouldn’t worry too much until there is an actual use case, and if there is a use case, then why worry?

I don't usually worry much about over-hyped technologies that gets the executive types all fuzzy inside while the rest of us look from afar wondering if they even understand what they're talking about. Web 2.0, NoSQL, IoT, Blockchain... The list is long. And it's not all trash, there's often some value at the core of the hype once you remove all the fluff.

But Blockchain is a bit more nefarious that this IMO, because it goes hand in hand with cryptocurrencies. The huge valuation of cryptocurrencies is the only reason Blockchains got so much publicity in the first place. I'm certain that if Bitcoin hadn't recovered from it's huge crash a couple of years ago you wouldn't see nearly as much Blockchain this and Blockchain that everywhere.

Conversely if you look at cryptocurrency enthusiast forums they use these news articles about big companies investing money and resources into "the blockchain" as proof that there's some high intrinsic value to the technology and to justify a very high valuation and pump it even more, especially to newcomers. "IBM is going to create a blockchain, BUY BUY BUY!"

It results in a big spiral of hype enabling scams enabling hype enabling scams... Meanwhile as far as I can see the only practical use cases of cryptocurrencies and even "the blockchain" at large is unbridled speculation, pyramid schemes and buying illegal stuff online. All that while expanding a ridiculous amount of energy mining the damn thing.

[jsutton]

> Meanwhile as far as I can see the only practical use cases of cryptocurrencies and even "the blockchain" at large is unbridled speculation, pyramid schemes and buying illegal stuff online.

You aren't looking very hard, then!

[michaelmrose]

Presumably your engineers didn't want to move from world a where they understand why things break to world b where any change even to a landing page could cause a cascade of failures due to automation that depends on that page.

A world where such failures causing production to fail become more likely because its challenging to predict ahead of time who depends on what and it what way.

Where they presumably have to then debug the mess.

Your engineers were right and unfortunately you are probably wrong about dumb ideas not selling.

[eksemplar]

Predicting time and allocating resources is my headache, and while RPA will make that worse, it also supports our primary function in a way that gives our more possibilities than we’ve had in years.

If we can save nurses for 10.000 administrative hours a yearwith RPA, then we’ll absolutely do it, even if it comes at the cost of having more work in operations. I mean, why wouldn’t we? Supporting the business end is our sole purpose of existence.

It’s not that bad though. We mainly use it as a last resort, either as something temporary while we wait for an API or on systems that will never have an API. A lot of these systems are old, one of our mainframe interfaces haven’t changed in 16 years.

On top of that, patch notifications in the public sector are often written solely for end users. This means that it’s actually easier to predict a button changing in an interface than an API breaking.

I’ve seen REST interfaces change, and break, without warning because the REST bit was really just slapped on there by sales.

Our first RPA poc saves us around 9.000 hours a year. It helped us get our case working up to a point where we’re within the legal deadlines (something we’ve never been before) and due to the lower pressure in the department we’ve managed to turn employee satisfaction from a 4/7 to a 5.6/7 and reducing sick leave from 15% to 8.

My department had to hire an extra engineer because if it and the business end had to allocate 1/4 of a yearly position to support the process. The business case is still green financially.

My engineers have never been more wrong. Even if the tech sucks, but that’s still my headache. Because I fully realize I can’t have a CS candidate do drag-and-drop programming full time and keep them happy.