Process Automation

Making services work together saves time and manpower. Steve Cassidy explores the potential of modern automation platforms.

- Steve Cassidy

Automation, like writing scripts? Our IT guys already do that. It’s true, IT folk have been automating things for decades – tasks such as making backups and archiving old files, which might take thousands of repetitive mouse-clicks to do by hand. But the new wave of automation is much more ambitious than that. It’s about automating entire business processes, and interfacing with all sorts of services and devices. It hardly overlaps at all with the sort of old-school scripting you might be familiar with.

Are we talking about handing off drudge-work to computers? 

Potentially, yes. We’re not talking about making humans obsolete, but helping them to work more efficiently. For example, imagine you’re a cab driver for a small firm; a decade or two ago, you’d have driven around with a radio, receiving instructions from a full-time operator back at HQ. Today we can automate the process, so that customers can book a ride online and have details forwarded directly to your phone. Throw in a customer relations app and there’s very little need for radios and phone lines – unless something goes wrong.