In practice
Treat RPA as a bridge with an expected end date. It is genuinely valuable where a vendor will not open an interface and replacement is years away. It becomes a liability when it is used as the default integration method, because every robot is a dependency on a screen layout somebody else controls.
Where it fits in a build
Good fit: a mainframe or an old line-of-business application that must be fed daily. Poor fit: two modern systems that both have APIs, where a direct integration is cheaper to build and far cheaper to keep running.
Common mistakes
- Using RPA where an API exists, then maintaining it forever.
- No alerting when a robot silently fails, so the first sign of trouble is a missing day of data.
- Running robots under a shared login, which destroys the audit trail.
Related terms
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