[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need a solution that appears sexy to the worker, the boss and a champion high enough in the organization to overrule outdated IT policy.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.