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I've seen this pop up where team A owns a web app (likely legacy) and team B has heavy and increasing use of the app. Team B realizes that they spend so much time shuffling data in and out of the app and realizes, team A should build an API so we can automate process and reporting. So a tentative plan forms. Team B meets team A and asks for the API. Team B seeks funding to code on top of the planned API. But it falls through, team A doesn't have time/budget for the project, isn't interested in the idea, or otherwise rejects the idea. This is especially true if team A has other larger, more important users. Team A regroups and tries RPA to make their own programmatic interface on team B's app without their help. The RPA promise that non-programmers can automate their own jobs is also compelling, and is seen as a cost savings. What I've seen happen next is that nothing really happens. End users are capable of writing RPA, but don't want to. Any automation is flakey, and may not actually reduce costs. Most folks continue getting paid to shuffle data, who'd want to automate away their own paycheck? Also, since team B didn't want to build an API and isn't part of the effort, there's a bunch of ugly issues: no programmatic contract/interface, no docs, no versioning, no backwards compatibility, no forward notice of changes, no access to test environments. So the automation can unexpected break or begin corrupting data, it needs regular monitoring. As a developer, that sounds terrible. But if there's no other way to automate, it's attractive. |