Why we LOVE Automation

You have to love Automation

When people and technology meet there's one thing we humans all have in common; we hate wasting time doing stuff that our computers should be doing for us.

It struck me yesterday, when I got my new Samsung Galaxy S III phone (way cool btw), just how far we have come. After I activated the phone, I logged into my Google account and within 15 minutes it had automatically;

• Downloaded all the apps I had download over the prior 2 years onto my old Droid X
• Downloaded and configured ALL wifi and internet settings for home and office
• Download and configured all GMAIL, Exchange mail, contacts, calendars and tasks
• Restored all my bookmarks and phone favorites
• and was ready to go as my replacement phone

We can all remember when something like this would takes hours, sometimes days, just to resync a phone to be like our old one.

We take it for Granted, that someone at, in my case Google, wrote some automation tools that would save whatever we do on one Google device, to a central place so it would make moving to the next device a breeze. Some might not call this automation! I guess it could be called backup/restore or synching but the truth is, it automated what I used to do so I don't have to do it any more.

Remember when you would get an email on your smart phone with a phone number in it and you had to write down that number just so as you could retype it in the phone app and press send (sometimes still faster than copy and paste)? Nowadays you just click the phone number in the smart phone email and the inbuilt automation detects it's a number and sends it over to the phone app and dials it for you (doesn't work for international numbers but heh, you can't have it all).

Now turn for just a moment to the most costly part of any enterprise; PEOPLE. What do our people spend their time doing all day? For many companies, call centers, back office, task workers etc., our people sit at a desktop computer; This is WHERE PEOPLE AND TECHNOLOGY meet. Why do our people spend their time, day in, day out, doing things on their computer that the computer could and should be doing for them. Some examples;

• Updating 3 different systems with an address change (15 copy/pastes)
• Taking an order and updating the delivery system with a date and then sending an email confirmation to the customer to confirm
• Typing in notes at the end of a call or task (ironically telling the computer what they just did)
• Traversing through spreadsheets, looking up the internet for each customer id and typing results back into the spreadsheet
• Looking up some value(s) on the system, applying a rule (they've been trained on) and determine what to say to the customer
• Searching 4 systems looking for some notes from the previous call/chat/email/tweet
• Forgetting to check "account on hold" before booking an engineer site visit

How awesome would it be if you could automate all this work? That's where Desktop Automation from OpenSpan comes in. You can quite literally automate any of these steps (where people and technology meet) so all you leave your costly employees to do is to focus on the customer or key parts of the task. Automation is key to our lives. It saves us not just fractions of a percent in time and money but 10's and sometimes (as in my Phone migration), 100's of percent. Check it out. Where people and technology meet