| Author here. In an ideal firm, where data is handled responsibly, you would not need RPA at all. In large organizations though, data tends to accumulate in monolithic islands that are only exposed to each other with legacy UI based applications. Moving this data tends to make up a large bulk of white-collar jobs in large organizations. RPA replicates the work that these workers do by automating on the UI of the legacy application and replacing them. It is championed by ambitious business professionals who 1) Don't know that a more elegant solution exists in the traditional IT world 2) Don't receive enough support from the IT org to solve this business problem that is crucial to them. Therefore, such business professionals collaborate with consultants to spear-head RPA projects in the name of digitization, ushering in AI or similarly varnished back-doors. However, as long as important data tends to accumulate in disparate islands that IT doesn't have the time to pay heed to, RPA projects will continue to be sold at a price that is a little lower than the salaries of the employees they 'liberate'. There is, although, another wrinkle to this. 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. |
>1) Don't know that a more elegant solution exists in the traditional IT world
>2) Don't receive enough support from the IT org to solve this business problem that is crucial to them.
>Therefore, such business professionals collaborate with consultants to spear-head RPA projects in the name of digitization, ushering in AI or similarly varnished back-doors.
Sounds like Conway's Law taken to an absurd degree and turned into a multibillion dollar industry.