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by ethbr0 1556 days ago
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?
2 comments
honey-badger 1555 days ago
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.
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_dain_ 1555 days ago
>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.

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honey-badger 1555 days ago
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need a solution that appears sexy to the worker, the boss and a champion high enough in the organization to overrule outdated IT policy.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.

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Foobar8568 1555 days ago
RPA enables the digital transformation of your company! /s
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ethbr0 1555 days ago
"Digital transformation" is a nice way of spelling "Unf@$cking Your Terrible Use of Computers"
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