By James Maguire – Well, RPA is certainly getting a ton of hype. I follow a lot of technologies and trends but RPA is getting a lot more hype than most. RPA solves a very specific problem that is very timely. There’s a lot of manual tasks that people can’t or don’t want to complete and RPA is really good and well-suited for highly repetitive tasks, automating them, taking key strokes, entering into either websites or systems and completely automating them.

So the nice thing about it is that it’s very focused and has a really sort of quick ROI for a lot of cases. I think, though, people have seen so much of the hype, especially with the term robotic with RPA, that it sort of… I think of the saying, when you’re a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

People have then taken RPA and tried to say, “Oh I can solve all these different things.” Some of them, maybe they shouldn’t be trying to solve with RPA. And so I would caution people, it’s a good tool in the toolbox, but just like you wouldn’t use a hammer for everything, you might need a wrench, a saw, a crowbar. Knowing how to choose the right tools as part of an overall strategy is important. Read On: