What Bradman Teaches us About RPA

This article is written by Shaun Dawson, Principal Architect, Platform Solutions at our partner, UiPath.

Like most Americans, I know almost nothing about the game of cricket. In fact, the first time I watched a match, it was unintelligible to me. I've come along since then, and while I don't fully understand cricket, at least it doesn't seem made up as a goof on us Yanks to me anymore. In learning about the game, though, I came across an interesting tidbit that I think has important parallels to succeeding with robotic process automation (RPA), and I thought I'd write it up.

Bradman the greatest

One of the best batsmen ever to play the game of cricket was an Australian named Sir Donald Bradman. Bradman was a master of a format called "Test cricket," which is a particularly grueling form of the game where a match is played over the course of as many as five days. (For those not familiar with cricket, the term "test" might be synonymous with "trial" or "pilot", implying something quick and easy. But in the context of cricket, test means a test of the competitors' endurance. This is just one of a thousand things I found confusing about this amazing game). To give you an indication of exactly how dominant Bradman was compared to his peers, his career batting average was 99.94 runs over a career that lasted 20 years. The player in the number two spot has 61.87 runs, not quite 62% of Bradman's. To accomplish this, Bradman's strategy was insultingly simple: hit the ball, on the ground, where there weren't any defenders. This is usually enough to get to the next wicket, for a run. Then, do it over, and over, and over again.

Read the full article at UiPath here.