I have been working with BPM since 2006 and I have been doing robot related projects since 1999 so when I saw the term “Robotic Process Automation” (RPA) I jumped over it with all my strength, just to freak out days later to the amount of lies and manipulation that sales and marketing people is capable of.

RPA is a neologism that was invented in relation with process automation, similar to “Business Process Management”. If you are into BPM you know that marketing people always are blunt to point differences between BPM and workflows but any expert in the field knows this is mostly lies and that the workflow engine is a primordial part of the BPM solution.

Nevertheless you could “save” the BPM concept because of several things:

• ESB or microservices integration,
• legacy system connectors for AS400 / SAP / Tibco integration
• SSO integration to provide a lean experience when it came to auth/auth
• a bitty-little gobernance if the solution was very well implemented
• maybe realistic analyitics if events are generated appropiately
• … and other stuff

But looking at this RPA thing I am completely annoyed at the lack of delivery the concept has behind it, biggest vaporware ever!, RPA suites are talking about AI but there is none, RPA suites are talking about screen scrapping like if it was not here since Rational Robot.

FYI let me tell you screen scrapping is extremely limited, specially in non-windows environment (funny that some RPA tools proponents are .NET based suites). At the same time those RPA tools say “automated screen interaction if just a minor part of it”, and you keep on looking and you find no new feature at all!!!