5 ms·

As someone who implemented and runs RPA in the public sector I would be interested if you made a couple of things come true. No one offers an easy way to let e

by virvar 6y ago

As someone who implemented and runs RPA in the public sector I would be interested if you made a couple of things come true. No one offers an easy way to let employees build and share “personal” bots. Part of this has to do with non-programmers having a much harder time understanding things like loops than we imagined they would. Another problem is maintaining business process logic and knowledge as employees come and go. And lastly there is the security thing. In an enterprise setting you probably won’t want to run this in someone else’s cloud, you want to run it through your IT operations in your own onsite/cloud/whatever to both utilise your local accessing rights but also to make sure data never leaves you. Maybe we’re not who you are targeting, but we’ve yet to find a product that actually lets us let employees build small bots in a way that fits into our IT operations, and this is quite a big market in my country. Of course you’ll be late to the table, and not be what the big consultant agencies like EY are partnered with. But what they are currently selling isn’t actually what we need. So good luck, I’ll certainly add you to our “keep a look out” list.

JoeSmithson 6y ago
Are you able to say what part of the public sector you have worked with? I am interested in this area, I am sure it is a potential gold mine for productivity (and land mine!).
- virvar 6y ago
  I work in the digitalisation department of a danish city. We have a couple of running processes. Mainly for paying already approved bills and benefits through different systems. Which aren’t only web based. But we had/have an intention of letting people use personal automation tools like this project when/if the right setup becomes available.
yaseer 6y ago
Thanks for the insights!
productive 6y ago
Virvar - out of curiosity - why is it that you would like to let the users build those bots? Intuitively, users just don't have the skills, patience, the technical mindset, the understanding of the IT landscape (imagine some non-working SSO - which user is going to know how to get that to work!). Basically "what's wrong" with doing it 'the normal way' - which is to have an IT team (in-house or external like EY) do the work?
- JPKab 6y ago
  Have you ever worked in a large enterprise? It doesn't seem like you actually have. In large companies asking IT to do things is a death sentence for a project. They are viewed as a cost center and therefore typically under resourced and often times lacking in skill. Bringing in a consultant is even worse. They'll be gone as the tech rots and nobody will know how to fix it. Democratizing these kinds of things to the users is highly successful and enhances business productivity. The old school only the pros know what they're doing mindset is awful. The success of companies such as tableau and alteryx are examples of the huge value add that companies can get when they just let their business analysts do things that used to require coders.
  - productive 6y ago
    I hear you I hear you. I guess my main curiosity is, given a) automations that are more useful / valuable / powerful require more sophisticated techniques and concepts (loops, sessions, states, etc.) and given b) that non-expert users typically don't have them, then how can we solve this problem? I see the following options: 1) either (pro)users limit themselves to more trivial / simple automations that are useful enough, with the skills they have, but they can't do more and that's that 2) or there has to be some level of expert involvement (IT, freelancer, consultant, or an FTE hired by the department to do this kind of automation work) - so there needs to be some level of budget 3) there's some tool that makes it possible to deliver more complex scenarios without the (pro) user needing to understand those aforementioned concepts I'd say the RPAs of the world fall into category 2) - requiring a lot of budget, thereby being limited to the very few highest RoI kind of use cases that can afford this budget. I'd say many tools out there (including UIPath, Axiom, and many others) try to be 3) but end up being 1) or 2). The problem seems to be not with the tool, but with the fundamental challenge of trying to do something more complex without the skill. For the record, I'm not saying it is an unworthy endeavour, I just haven't seen any great examples that manage to crack this. One exception: very domain specific topics. You mention Tableau - basically 'all' the user is doing with it is to slice and view and filter data (that has been connected by experts) in different ways. So the users aren't 'creating', the way they are when they are creating automations. What is your view?
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
lucasverra 6y ago
>run it through your IT operations in your own onsite/cloud/whatever to both utilise your local accessing rights but also to make sure data never leaves you. would a docker deployment to be hosted on your public sector cloud vendor OK ?
- virvar 6y ago
  Yes, as an example we can run docker (for windows) on our own VMs or (all) in our Azure setup.
eastendguy 6y ago
" you want to run it ... in your own onsite/cloud/whatever" => I agree. If security and/or privacy is an issue, better use a non SaaS solution. There are many options available, such as UIPath or UI.Vision, or simply Selenium if it is only about web automation.

by virvar 6y ago

JoeSmithson 6y ago

Are you able to say what part of the public sector you have worked with? I am interested in this area, I am sure it is a potential gold mine for productivity (and land mine!).

virvar 6y ago
I work in the digitalisation department of a danish city. We have a couple of running processes. Mainly for paying already approved bills and benefits through different systems. Which aren’t only web based. But we had/have an intention of letting people use personal automation tools like this project when/if the right setup becomes available.

yaseer 6y ago

Thanks for the insights!

productive 6y ago

Virvar - out of curiosity - why is it that you would like to let the users build those bots? Intuitively, users just don't have the skills, patience, the technical mindset, the understanding of the IT landscape (imagine some non-working SSO - which user is going to know how to get that to work!). Basically "what's wrong" with doing it 'the normal way' - which is to have an IT team (in-house or external like EY) do the work?

JPKab 6y ago
Have you ever worked in a large enterprise? It doesn't seem like you actually have. In large companies asking IT to do things is a death sentence for a project. They are viewed as a cost center and therefore typically under resourced and often times lacking in skill. Bringing in a consultant is even worse. They'll be gone as the tech rots and nobody will know how to fix it. Democratizing these kinds of things to the users is highly successful and enhances business productivity. The old school only the pros know what they're doing mindset is awful. The success of companies such as tableau and alteryx are examples of the huge value add that companies can get when they just let their business analysts do things that used to require coders.
- productive 6y ago
  I hear you I hear you. I guess my main curiosity is, given a) automations that are more useful / valuable / powerful require more sophisticated techniques and concepts (loops, sessions, states, etc.) and given b) that non-expert users typically don't have them, then how can we solve this problem? I see the following options: 1) either (pro)users limit themselves to more trivial / simple automations that are useful enough, with the skills they have, but they can't do more and that's that 2) or there has to be some level of expert involvement (IT, freelancer, consultant, or an FTE hired by the department to do this kind of automation work) - so there needs to be some level of budget 3) there's some tool that makes it possible to deliver more complex scenarios without the (pro) user needing to understand those aforementioned concepts I'd say the RPAs of the world fall into category 2) - requiring a lot of budget, thereby being limited to the very few highest RoI kind of use cases that can afford this budget. I'd say many tools out there (including UIPath, Axiom, and many others) try to be 3) but end up being 1) or 2). The problem seems to be not with the tool, but with the fundamental challenge of trying to do something more complex without the skill. For the record, I'm not saying it is an unworthy endeavour, I just haven't seen any great examples that manage to crack this. One exception: very domain specific topics. You mention Tableau - basically 'all' the user is doing with it is to slice and view and filter data (that has been connected by experts) in different ways. So the users aren't 'creating', the way they are when they are creating automations. What is your view?

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

lucasverra 6y ago

>run it through your IT operations in your own onsite/cloud/whatever to both utilise your local accessing rights but also to make sure data never leaves you. would a docker deployment to be hosted on your public sector cloud vendor OK ?

virvar 6y ago
Yes, as an example we can run docker (for windows) on our own VMs or (all) in our Azure setup.

eastendguy 6y ago

" you want to run it ... in your own onsite/cloud/whatever" => I agree. If security and/or privacy is an issue, better use a non SaaS solution. There are many options available, such as UIPath or UI.Vision, or simply Selenium if it is only about web automation.