The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Technology Mind
Value Creation Plan Newsletter #109
In the "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" (2004), Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet go through a memory erasure process to forget about their relationship.
It is a beautiful film exploring how memory, identity, love (and pain!) is an essential part of human experience.
The movie is based on a key question: Is it a blessing or a curse to be able to remember painful experiences?
I was thinking about the movie when reading a great article by Kimberly Tan at a16z: RIP to RPA.
The article argues that while RPA promised to automate repetitive office tasks, its rigid, rules-based approach fell short. AI-powered automation could now fulfill RPA's original vision through by increased flexibility, ease of implementation and better handling of exceptions.
I love working in Technology. The hype, hysteria and hope of every technology wave can be intoxicating.
At the same time, we tend to forget (or conveniently ignore!) the messy reality of implementations.
AI is making RPA obsolete. It is able to adapt without reprogramming. It can handle unstructured data and understand context to make better decisions in ways RPA never could. And it can self-monitor for process stability and security to mitigate risks in real time.
AI is already exponentially better, but can we just forget the lessons from rolling out RPA?
Like the movie, is it a blessing or a curse to remember how painful RPA was?
So, what happened with RPA? Well, it turns out RPA actually worked exactly as designed – it automated rule-based, repetitive tasks with high accuracy.
But then, why did a seemingly straightforward technology often fall short of expectations?
What began as a promising technological solution often turned into rushed deployments driven by vendor hype.
Organizations frequently underestimated the complexity of their processes and overestimated their readiness for automation.
Legacy systems proved more challenging to automate than anticipated, and cross-system complexity grew exponentially as implementations scaled.
Meanwhile, the promise of DIY "citizen developers" created unrealistic expectations about maintenance and troubleshooting capabilities by assuming an average employee could run the bots without IT support.
Unclear ownership between IT and business units, coupled with poor governance structures, led to a proliferation of poorly maintained bots.
These issues were then compounded by insufficient process documentation and a lack of understanding about true exception handling requirements.
And this is before risk and compliance teams arrived to try to understand what was going on in the bot "black box".
As a result, staff resistance across industry implementations grew. Automation became a contentious term that bred resistance among employees fearing job displacement.
Ultimately, we all saw lots of half baked implementations that often failed to deliver their promised value. But, when done right, the net benefit was great in back office processes optimisation, yielding true savings.
As we now look forward as an industry, we can all do so much better this time around:
We can be cautiously optimistic, listening to the sales pitches from vendors, but not taking them always at face value
We can engage execs and staff more honestly, being clear and transparent on the objectives and limitations of the automation
We can focus on the right processes to automate, being realistic about the costs incurred, ongoing maintenance and ultimate benefits
If we get the people, processes and politics of any technology rollout right, we increase the odds of the rollout being successful.
In the movie, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet found out that erasing memories did not solve underlying relationship issues.
In our industry, we grow stronger by embracing our implementation scars rather than erasing them.
May we always live in interesting times, with the eternal sunshine of a spotless mind,
Juan
Excellent piece. RPA was great in theory but the practical implementation was often a nightmare, especially with smaller companies. Vendors who over-promise, departments that play hot potato with an initiative, and managers paranoid that efficiency would decrease their value led to a toxic brew. History is critically important in business, and as we use Gen AI, I for one am committed to remembering the lessons of the last technological fix.