The Care and Feeding of Bots

ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION (RPA) software exploded on the stage of business technology in the mid-2010s and quickly became the fastest growing technology trend of the last fifty years. By 2020 RPA has grown into a nearly $10 billion industry, and continues to grow at high-double-digit rates. RPA has been viewed as a miracle technology that allows companies to automate their persistent manual processes, making them better, faster and cheaper with nearly no cost or effort.The reality has...
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ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION (RPA) software exploded on the stage of business technology in the mid-2010s and quickly became the fastest growing technology trend of the last fifty years. By 2020 RPA has grown into a nearly $10 billion industry, and continues to grow at high-double-digit rates. RPA has been viewed as a miracle technology that allows companies to automate their persistent manual processes, making them better, faster and cheaper with nearly no cost or effort.The reality has proven otherwise.RPA promised fast, cheap and good automation of business processes, with return on investment measured in weeks or days. But, by 2018 reality began to settle in. RPA was more difficult than believed and the majority of organizations were failing with RPA, rather than succeeding. By 2020, the RPA wave was crashing and most organizations were scaling back, or abandoning, their RPA initiatives. In 2020, if you google the phrase "RPA implementation failure" you'll receive over 5 million hits. Thousands of clients are struggling to make their RPA robots, or "Bot", work correctly and generate the sorts of benefits promised. The vast majority of clients fail to realize the expected gains, and RPA has been seen to stumble as a result of these consistently-poor results.What happened to RPA, and more importantly, why is it failing? This book is the result of five years of effort in putting RPA to work for major organizations all over the world. "Bots" details the author's lessons-learned in deploying thousands of bots at dozens of leading organizations In this book, he explains why bots are failing to deliver the goods, and what it takes to make bots work in your organization. Author Chris Surdak ("Data Crush" and "Jerk") summarizes the results of five years of effort in deploying hundreds of bots for dozens of organizations around the world. Along the way he experienced any number of failures, missteps, hyperbole and errors as people tried to learn how to use this new technology. "Bots" lays out the eighteen different ways that bots seem to "fail" and how to avoid those failures with your own bots. "Bots" also discusses the next wave of cognitive bots and artificial intelligence, and how these technologies are even more finicky and difficult to succeed with.Over the next ten years cyber workers like bots will subsume an enormous amount of the work currently performed by humans. Their adoption is inevitable. "Bots" is your guide for how to leverage these digital workers effectively, before your competitors do!