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My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

anupam.de

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Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#51

Post by ethbr0 »

Foobar8568 wrote: post #37
ethbr0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the pitch is: > automate things in a project/environment/client/process that otherwise would wait until heat death of universe to be automated Which is to say "things no one else cares about or thinks are important enohgh to spend time automating." RPA isn't for major corporate priorities. RPA is for that thing that takes up 25% of a 3-person team's week. Or 15% of every contact center agent's time. Neither of wh…

RPA enables the digital transformation of your company! /s

"Digital transformation" is a nice way of spelling "Unf@$cking Your Terrible Use of Computers"

Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#52

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ethbr0 wrote: post #44
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's terrifying how much critical functionality at an average company exists only in 1-3 brains. It's not actually terrifying. It's the way that businesses have worked for centuries. There's always a "high priest[ess]" in the woodpile, somewhere, that has "The Keys to the Kingdom." Most businesses have some form of continuity or recovery plan, but many would collapse, without the Key Player, and they do. The flip s…

I guess the thing that surprised and terrified me is that in your modern, hyper-efficient business, these people are everywhere . Because there isn't much you can't do with 1-3 people, if you leverage the right (non-RPA) software to enable them. So consequently, the Key Player turns out to be sprinkled throughout the org. And, the really scary part, awareness of "who that person is" generally doesn't seem to penetrat…

I worked for a 100-year-old Japanese engineering corporation.

They had a seriously robust structure and policy. It worked (check what Japan has been through, in the last 100 years).

But it brings massive overhead and rigidity. Most American companies would not want to work that way.

Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#53

Post by ragebol »

honey-badger wrote: post #49
ragebol wrote: post #29

Can someone explain to me where the robots in RPA are? It's just scripting for UIs, the way I understand it

It's a terrible name that has unfortunately stuck. Deliberate obfuscation.

100% agreed. I do actual robots (you know, that drive around and pick stuff up etc) and get LinkedIn messages for doing RPA. Read my profile!

Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#54

Post by _dain_ »

honey-badger wrote: post #38
xorcist wrote: post #11

Please explain to me what the use of RPA is. Here's my background in the subject: I have met with team of a dozen people that spent half a year doing something that turned out to be the functional equivalent on an SQL one-liner. They could not within our meeting slot accurately describe what it is they were doing, apart from "automating tedious work" (yes, but what is that work, specifically?) and kept insisting I wa…

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 legac…

>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.

Sounds like Conway's Law taken to an absurd degree and turned into a multibillion dollar industry.

Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#55

Post by honey-badger »

ragebol wrote: post #53
honey-badger wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a terrible name that has unfortunately stuck. Deliberate obfuscation.

100% agreed. I do actual robots (you know, that drive around and pick stuff up etc) and get LinkedIn messages for doing RPA. Read my profile!

Damn! You are like the bystander who gets taken out during a gang raid in your neighbourhood.

Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#56

Post by _dain_ »

honey-badger wrote: post #41
ethbr0 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the pitch is: > automate things in a project/environment/client/process that otherwise would wait until heat death of universe to be automated Which is to say "things no one else cares about or thinks are important enohgh to spend time automating." RPA isn't for major corporate priorities. RPA is for that thing that takes up 25% of a 3-person team's week. Or 15% of every contact center agent's time. Neither of wh…

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.

>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.

Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#57

Post by nus07 »

xorcist wrote: post #11

Please explain to me what the use of RPA is. Here's my background in the subject: I have met with team of a dozen people that spent half a year doing something that turned out to be the functional equivalent on an SQL one-liner. They could not within our meeting slot accurately describe what it is they were doing, apart from "automating tedious work" (yes, but what is that work, specifically?) and kept insisting I wa…

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.

Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#58

Post by yaseer »

honey-badger wrote: post #45
yaseer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, RPA is just User Interface Automation. Unfortunately, A lot of RPA companies, including UiPath, have co-opted the word RPA into enterprise marketing, alongside words like 'AI', so the words lose meaning. But RPA is just automating the UI, when no API exists. Disclosure: I'm a co-founder in an RPA startup. I think RPA is a confusing, historical accident of a name.

Spot-on! From the beginning, I have hated the term 'RPA'. It reeks of deliberate obfuscation, like putting a shiny package around a used sock. PS: I checked out Axiom yesterday and am excited to see the problem you're solving. Wish you guys all the best!

Thanks!

We think UI automation has a lot of potential as a programming paradigm accessible to non-coders. Once RPA hype and noise dies down, perhaps a few signals like that will remain.

Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#59

Post by peterangular »

nus07 wrote: post #57
xorcist wrote: post #11

Please explain to me what the use of RPA is. Here's my background in the subject: I have met with team of a dozen people that spent half a year doing something that turned out to be the functional equivalent on an SQL one-liner. They could not within our meeting slot accurately describe what it is they were doing, apart from "automating tedious work" (yes, but what is that work, specifically?) and kept insisting I wa…

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…

> 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.

Re: My biggest mistake as an RPA developer

#60

Post by sharps1 »

xorcist wrote: post #11

Please explain to me what the use of RPA is. Here's my background in the subject: I have met with team of a dozen people that spent half a year doing something that turned out to be the functional equivalent on an SQL one-liner. They could not within our meeting slot accurately describe what it is they were doing, apart from "automating tedious work" (yes, but what is that work, specifically?) and kept insisting I wa…

Imagine one person using a web app to click through a list of up to 50 items with multiple clicks to have a letter printed to a person (Which take an hour or so).

That process is done in 20 separate locations by 20 separate people. With RPA we can automate that entire process (We don’t control the web app and have to wait for features from the vendor).

(The process is more complicated than this, but you get the idea).

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