[throwaway8481]

As an aside: I'm stunned how willing my own org is to train an RPA process that can break so easily, vs scripting the same actions in PowerShell and performing it against a REST interface in ServiceNow (our ticketing system). They scream and cry about proper authentication methods to ServiceNow (OAuth not username + password), and then they're happy to let an RPA process clunk around doing something recorded. They shot down the script that works, and are investing hundreds of hours in an RPA expert to do it with many less scripted validation steps. Just ugh.

[haswell]

Wait…are they using RPA to automate interactions with ServiceNow? i.e. they’re controlling the ServiceNow UI? If so, that’s pretty terrible.

This kind of project baffles my mind. RPA should be used for situations when there is no API available, and from what I understand of the ServiceNow product, it has all kinds of APIs for automation use cases.

[throwaway8481]

Our ServiceNow team literally believes use of the REST API is a security risk, because you can insert "bad data" into the incident table and others. I showed them different ways you can break the web GUI to do things like creating a ticket without a customer, or setting a ticket to On Hold without an On Hold Reason, etc. I actually created a dashboard called the "Gallery of Broken Tickets" because they didn't know how to make reports and dashboards, and then I presented this to them to show them bad data that currently exists in `incident`. I'm never getting hired to that team.

But yes, RPA is big at our org right now. In ServiceNow too.