BrainBlog for Tricentis by Jason Bloomberg
Automation has been around for centuries and business process automation has been part of organizations’ operations for decades. Robotic process automation, in contrast, has only been on the radar for a handful of years — and yet, it has taken the world of automation by storm.
Automation, of course, has been a reality since the Jacquard loom of the early 19th, when punchcards instructed machines on how to complete automated tasks. And just as its punchcard technology inspired Charles Babbage and later Herman Hollerith to “program” machines to perform more advanced operations, automation itself has evolved over the years as technology innovations hit the market.
We could even argue that the point of the first digital computers was to perform automation — albeit mostly of calculation tasks. As computing technology progressed, people gained the ability to hand-code automation — either by creating bespoke applications that automated otherwise manual processes or by creating applications that orchestrated interactions among other, older applications.
While such hand-coding can create any automation the business is likely to require, it is onerous, slow and inflexible, as any change in requirements leads to another full software iteration.
Such limitations of traditional automation gave rise to robotic process automation (RPA). The basic idea behind RPA: get a piece of software to take over the mundane interactions necessary to complete a process that involves transferring information between multiple (otherwise siloed) applications.
No longer does a human have to click buttons, cut and paste values or type data into fields. Instead, the RPA bot will do all that for you. Just think of all the time and money that can be saved.
