[nus07]

I worked for a large healthcare system in the past where a lot of the data that I was providing bio-statisticians with required combining with some files from NIH,CMS and other websites. Now ideally there should have been ways to use APIs to get those files' data. However its so bureaucratic that to get API access there were hundreds of permissions and documents required which would take several months. So someone on my team had to login everyday,download those files, unzip it, clean it and then run it to a database. It was annoying so I wrote a python script to do all those tasks and scheduled it. It was great until a few months later management and audit happened and it became a huge issue that an ad-hoc script with my credentials was doing this.Management wanted something that was standardized and 'maintainable'. So they replaced my script with thousands of dollars and hours of RPA based work from a big 4 consulting firm. This is why RPA exists.

[peterangular]

> It was great until a few months later management and audit happened and it became a huge issue that an ad-hoc script with my credentials was doing this. Management wanted something that was standardized and 'maintainable'

In corporate environments it's super common to experience functional success in parallel to social failure, especially like your anecdote. Most corps/management love terms like "intrapreneur" but have zero actual interest in formalizing + celebrating internal innovations/solutions.

[honey-badger]

Great perspective. Now if you were to take the place of Management and tell this exact story, how would it sound?