As the debate about outsourcing continues, IT directors
should be looking for creative ways to eliminate routine,
labour-intensive work. Surely the overriding goal for IT is to
automate repetitive, uninteresting work and to replace it with
intelligent business processes that are faster, more efficient and
less prone to errors?
As we look for more value from our IT systems, we must also ask
more of our employees. We should be using valuable people resources
to do far more than simple-minded paper-pushing and routine
processes - the role of people in an organisation should be to
think creatively and to add value by problem solving.
At the same time, IT departments should be considering new
opportunities to replace expensive processes in the organisation
where people add little value with automated processes. This can
often be done with the software products that have entered the
marketplace relatively recently.
One area where many companies will have a real opportunity is the
everyday task of data entry, which is often performed by clerical
staff or temporary workers. Document-recognition software can
eliminateÊmuch of the clerical work and the cost by automating the
process. This software is increasingly being taken up in
Scandinavia and Germany, where wages for clerical work are higher,
and is beginning to gain a foothold in the UK.
Companies here have shown that a typical investment to replace
manual systems can give a threefold return on investment. Some of
these savings can come from reducing the headcount for
administrative staff.
The processing power of a standard PC is now such that advanced
applications using techniques such as neural networks and ICR
(Intelligent Character Recognition, which borders on artificial
intelligence) can be introduced in any office. The software reads,
recognises and categorises documents in much the same way as a
human being, but many times faster.
This software can form part of a fully automated workflow process
and validate the data against the databases held in an enterprise
resource planning system, routing eachÊdocument to its next stage
in processing. Capturing data this way is relatively effortless and
the result is a tighter control over that part of the supply chain
process.
The extreme cost pressures that are leading companies to consider
outsourcing to India and China could itself be a widespread force
for change as it will require companies to look for other creative
ways to streamline their processes.
So although it is currently fashionable to outsource business
processes, I predict that the next wave of change will be
investment in new software applications through the identification
of business applications that have not been automated and which
need more innovative ways to make them efficient.
Bob Goodwin is director at consultancy Digital
Vision