18页的内容，有些部分有点重复和个人主义色彩（比如对印度技术人才需求的不看好，我个人不甚赞同）。有充足细节描述，值得阅读。
名词解释：
RPA: Robotic Process Automation
SOA: service-oriented architecture
BPO: Business Process Outsourcing
Wizard: A software wizard or setup assistant is a user interface type that presents a user with a sequence of dialog boxes that lead the user
through a series of well-defined steps.
重点摘录：
- Robotic automation, pioneered by UK-based vendor Blue Prism, that enables non-engineers to automate certain business processes quickly and cheaply.
- Blue Prism’s novel idea is to give business units a tool to automate these ad hoc processes on their own, addressing their custom requirements without relying on an expensive, lengthy IT development process, or hiring costly onshore workers for which they have no budget, or shipping the work offshore. It calls this concept “robotic automation,” and refers to the custom applications produced by its software and methodology as “robots.”
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The Blue Prism product consists of four nested development components:
- Application Modeller – This tool uses a wizard-based point-and-click interface to map every onscreen element used by every existing application that will be involved in the business process to be automated. After all onscreen elements have been mapped, the tool generates an Application Model that functions as a repository for all reusable service components.
- Object Studio – This tool creates reusable Business Objects via a flowchart interface. It takes Application Models created by the Application Modeller tool and maps them to context-sensitive triggers that activate when a particular application scenario occurs. These triggers initiate sequences of data retrieval, updating, validation, and exception handling via control of the target application's user interface. This enables the orchestration of legacy systems with newer applications based on SOA architectures.
- Process Studio – This tool links Business Objects created by the Object Studio tool with external data sources such as web services, databases, messaging systems, and workflow systems, again using a flowchart interface. This enables the development team to configure the necessary business logic and business rules; the resulting output effectively is the automated version of the business process.
- Control Room – This tool controls the execution of the automated business process in any of several ways: as a web service within an existing SOA framework; as a scheduled task on a virtualized application infrastructure; or as a dynamic trigger-based process using existing enterprise assets like BPM, workflow, and messaging systems to initiate process automations.
- In concert, these four tools form a technology platform that allows the development team to design, build, test, deploy, and support a newly automated process while keeping it within the bounds of existing IT and security infrastructure controls and governance. The toolkit is further augmented with modules for workflow, scheduling, Active Directory integration, secure credential management, web services integration, reporting, analytics, auditing, and process optimization.
- In interviews with HfS Research, veteran Blue Prism users assert that the tool works as advertised, providing a complete development environment that business unit staffers with fairly limited IT skills (specifically, no software engineering experience) can quickly master to automate business processes. That said, there is a non-trivial learning curve that must be essayed to gain comfort with the conceptual flow of building the structure of application models, structuring models into objects, structuring objects into processes that interface with external systems, using the execution control tools to test and optimize the processes before taking them live, and performing ongoing analysis and optimization after the robots are in live operation.
- In short, giving non-engineers the ability to quickly automate a rules-driven business process with a robot that costs less than half of an offshore FTE is a significant threat to every outsourcing firm whose value proposition rests on low human labor costs.
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