RPA = Macros on steroids. To me, this is the simplest comparison. Everyone who’s used Excel know what a macro is. You record your key strokes and the macro plays them back when you tell it to. The steroid part comes from RPA’s ability to record key strokes from anywhere. Not just a single application. The opportunities for automating repetitive tasks are endless.

By Mike Fitzmaurice – Over the last several years, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has drummed up excitement among IT and business decision-makers alike.  It promises a bright future of humans leveraging robots to automate repetitive and mundane tasks, freeing themselves up for more creative work. But it’s worth a reality check.

It offers software robots, “bots” for short, that simulate the activity of users operating software manually. They virtually perform keypresses and mouse clicks. They read text from web pages and/or desktop application windows. You can script their behavior, including some conditional branching, and treat that script as a reusable component (a web service, for example).

It’s not new. We did this with mainframes two decades ago. We’ve been doing a basic version of it with recorded macros in applications like Word and Excel.

03For specific kinds of activities – the more repetitive, the better  – RPA works great. Do your users have to run two applications side by side and manually re-enter information from one into the other? Get a bot to do that instead. Read On: