Robotic Process Automation, UI, and Rise of Bots....

When I started my career with a data company, we used to collect data points from various documents into Microsoft excel spreadsheets and after the quality checks, the data used to be uploaded into the SQL database as batch file. The chances of errors were high, as at times, Excel used to replace zeros in the front unless, the cell formats were text, and the spell checks bare minimum.

After few years, we got our own UI or tool to enter data that had all the inbuilt error checks. It was in ASP or similar format simple five shades of grey, page that looked like more of a Microsoft Access form. We were happy with the progress, after all, we are having out first tool.

Years passed by, and our expectations were growing higher and higher, we started working with the developers to add some jazzy functions into the tool using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) so, we can drag and drop data points from one corner of the monitor to the other. In personal life, we still did not see a touch screen phone by then. Isn’t it pretty cool?

Few more years passed by and we started finding problem with the AJAX systems, data items got stuck to the mouse pointers or got dropped at a wrong place. We definitely needed a new technology!

We designed a set of cool looking apps this time using .NET frame work. Those tools were super cool and we could change the color of the buttons depending on our persona, smoothly drag and drop large data items, used two computer monitors instead of one. This lasted for the longest time around five plus years and then came so called RPA or robotic process automation.

When we started adding bots on the top of the tools, like every other people working in similar industries got stuck again! Designing bots on an ASP page was much easier than creating bots on an app! On top of it, your bots, if they used your app, can go only be fast as the underlying app is! After, so many years the apps were not faster as before any way. So, what’s the solution?

We took two approaches, in one, we tried to downgrade our tools to ASP/HTML pages, like it was 15 years back and in the second approach we bypassed the tools to use the Microsoft Excel files, so the bots can directly upload it to the database!

Why do we need to design an UI, where there is no user? If bots are the users, isn’t the.txt, xml, JASON much better? Although, we lost lot of data validations that were built into those apps through years of experience, but we could add our own anomaly checks programmatically. So, at the end of the day the concept of UI is going as the users are no more human!

When I keep thinking about the cycle, what comes to our mind is, isn’t it a way of going back to square one? In an ideal scenario, we should have skipped creating any apps/tools and directly ingests those Excels programmatically through scripts, into the database? Is it just a human nature to create a problem first and then try to solve it and call it a win?

I don’t know the answer to this, if you know, please feel free to comment. May be this is the last date for UIs…. The good question is (good questions never have answers!), If we auto ingest data from text, directly through bots to the backend tables, through a script (in near future through AI) , who do I need RPA? Isn’t it a simple auto extraction and standardization process? 

Disclaimer: The views expressed are mine and don’t necessarily reflect those of my past or present employer.