By Jason Bloomberg
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is among the hottest enterprise technologies today, as it promises simple automation of a wide variety of tasks that humans have heretofore performed in front of computers.
RPA is especially useful when the interactions are with older, legacy applications, especially applications running on mainframes. To this end, RPA tools typically take a ‘screen scraping’ approach that works at the user interface (UI) level, mimicking how the user clicks through screens.
Automation at the application programming interface (API) level is more resilient than UI automation, but the older apps that are prime targets for RPA often lack APIs. There’s little choice but to interact with the UI – at least, according to the leading RPA vendors.
The appeal of such screen scraping is clear: achieve all the business benefits of bot-driven automation without having to touch the code on the mainframe (or legacy midrange system).
However, while such an approach is expedient, it adds to the organization’s technical debt. Instead of resolving any issues with legacy application assets, RPA simply layers on a veneer that kicks the technical debt can down the road.
Somebody will have to clean up the legacy mess someday, but it won’t be you and it won’t be today.
When RPA screen scrapes mainframe apps, the technical debt problem is even worse. In reality, implementing bots that interact with mainframe screens not only adds to technical debt, it can adversely impact cost and performance as well.
