[xorcist]

So the pitch is that change management hasn't caught up with them .. yet.

The very second one of these runs has some non-intended consequences, and from the nature of the tools that's likely to happen sooner rather than later, change management will latch on to them and never let go.

The tools in question were very similar to Selenium. Any non trivial job is going to have logic in it. Definitively not any less programming involved than writing tests. They were clearly intended for a Microsoft focused audience however, so maybe that's part of it.

[ethbr0]

No, the pitch is:

> automate things in a project/environment/client/process that otherwise would wait until heat death of universe to be automated

Which is to say "things no one else cares about or thinks are important enohgh to spend time automating."

RPA isn't for major corporate priorities.

RPA is for that thing that takes up 25% of a 3-person team's week. Or 15% of every contact center agent's time. Neither of which are ever going to be prioritized.

Or, to put it another way, RPA is the answer to "That has value, but it isn't important enough to spend software developers' time on."

Which is why "but these people aren't software developers" or "but they didn't use git" or etc simplify to "If we had more software developers, this wouldn't be needed."

Yes.

But that's not true. Nor will likely ever be true. So it is needed.

PS: And fundamentally, it's taking corporate computing back from the "ask IT for anything" to "do it yourself" hacker ethos. Computers exist to do work for you. When did we forget that?

[honey-badger]

Amen! RPA is also about democritizing IT by handing (ideally) every white-collar worker the ability to write scripts that can automate pieces of their daily-work. Of course, those solutions aren't likely to be elegant and their code won't be clean, but since their scope is tiny, that isn't a problem.

[_dain_]

>handing (ideally) every white-collar worker the ability to write scripts that can automate pieces of their daily-work.

surely much of this could be done already with a tool like AutoHotKey? I mean it won't have some of the fancier stuff like screen scraping, but it gets you 80% of the way there in a lot of cases. the barrier is not the tools, it's the IT policies that prevent ordinary workers from being allowed to use them.

[honey-badger]

It's also a marketing problem. You need a solution that appears sexy to the worker, the boss and a champion high enough in the organization to overrule outdated IT policy.

I think RPA exists because every organization is plagued by people management problems that developers and IT often fail to acknowledge.

[Foobar8568]

RPA enables the digital transformation of your company! /s

[ethbr0]

"Digital transformation" is a nice way of spelling "Unf@$cking Your Terrible Use of Computers"

[NikolaNovak]

ethbr0 provided valuable perspective, but just to respond:

1. I've updated my post to make it more clear how change management is involved: Using native tools we would be, literally, "changing the application". RPA is not changing application; it is automating what people already do in application. It can get philosophical whether this is a real difference or semantic one; but in corporate world, it's real :). And ultimately in techie world too: ERP is not touched or customized by the RPA (which would have had meaningful and permanent repercussions for troubleshooting, vendor support, upgrades, retrofitting,etc). On Ops side too, we use same process and tools to troubleshoot an error in our application whether a human or RPA bot did it.

RPA bots still go through change management as such; but their risk, cost, implementation time and other profiles are simply vastly different than actually touching the COTS ERP application code. I would not necessarily use RPA to change most of the applications internally made by a company; but they're a valid choice for automating a externally sourced software.

2. I have limited experience with Selenium but I would agree that there are broad similarities. They even remind me of old Mercury/HP LoadRunner or SQA Robot. Just, couple of decades of advancement and different focus.

3. I feel "Clearly intended for a Microsoft focused audience" is some kind of insult, and somewhat uncalled for; but note our application runs on AIX on p-Series, FWIW.