Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Capitalizing on IT Automation

Even today, in many organizations installing desktops, laptops, printers and internet is termed as IT automation. In such organizations, they use Ms Word to type their letter and Memos. Ms Excel is used for recording accounting information.

This scenario is not confined to small organizations alone. Though it will be difficult to digest, believe me, this subsidiary of a prestigious government organization didn't have any IT solution to perform even basic functions as late as year 2010. 

It is not that government had been short of funds to automate one of its small departments. I believe, the leadership has been apprehensive about IT automation. The leadership felt some kind of personal satisfaction in signing a pile of documents every day. May be it gave them a feeling of power, which would otherwise be lost in the mesh of LAN cables. As a result, this organization used Ms Word for typing and distributing letters and memos. I must say they had a very efficient mechanism to manage these memos. For every small or big task or process with in any department they would prepare a memo and every memo had to be signed by originator, department head and finally the director of the organization. As a result, they have created a room full of papers. As I write this article their accounts are still maintained in Ms Excel.

Upon the insistence of the parent organization, ERP implementation started in this organization in the year 2010 and by the early 2011 ERP was implemented. However, did it really automate the organization or was it just change of tools that is from Ms Office to PeopleSoft?

Whenever an organization undertakes an IT automation project it must target to achieve following objectives. 
1.     Reduce number of steps by merging them or eliminating them to complete a process
2.     Reduce time taken to process information
3.     Reduce number of resources requirement to perform one task
4.     Capture complete information in a systematic manner
5.     Provide information in various formats for the decision makers to make knowledgeable decision
6.     Reduce number of hard copy documents in every step


In our subject organization, the system didn’t make any difference. All the processes are still same as before. The only difference is instead of Ms Office information is fed into PeoplSoft. At the end it is failure of the virtue of IT automation.

It is high time for the organizations to undermine the benefits of IT automation. IT automation is a tool for business process improvement and it should be leveraged for the growth of organzation.