[vba616]

>This hasn't been my experience.

What you mean by "experience" is unclear to me.

I agree with you insofar as everyone with even a little experience at a large company knows there are a lot of apparently low hanging fruit possibilities for automation.

But do you mean you have seen things that seem simple to automate, or have you tried to do so and found out what happens?

There is a lot going on below the surface.

[tstrimple]

Yes, plenty are absolutely trivial to implement. Things like "I move the file from this folder where it's dropped off by over night batch processing to this other folder and then I kick off the processing job" or "I copy these values into our master excel spreadsheet and take the results from the calculations and put them in this other system."

Extremely basic and low hanging fruit is all over the place.

[vba616]

>Yes, plenty are absolutely trivial to implement.

The most technically trivial change has a litany of obstacles involving people.

Off the top of my head:

1) Finding out a process exists

2) Finding out who knows about a process

3) Being able to communicate with such a person

4) Motivating them or other stakeholders to make a change

5) Making the new process independent of specific employees