The RPA world desperately needs standards

While demand for robotic process automation continues to skyrocket, it is increasingly accompanied by frustration over RPA's failure to deliver on promised improvements in productivity and cost savings. As might be expected, there's plenty of blame to go around for this situation, with industry insiders pointing to everything from a lack of proper RPA governance to organizations selecting the wrong processes to automate. Casting perhaps the largest shadow, however, is the absence of an industry-wide RPA framework that provides a standard way for describing what each process to be automated does in a way that all automation tools can understand. At present, RPA programs have little choice but to make do with the different ways process automations are described and detailed, with every RPA platform and the complementary tools that occupy different points along the automation value chain speaking a different language. Look, for example, at the inability of RPA users to open, read, and act on automation files in any RPA platform.