Office Automation – From Humble Beginnings
Office automation as a process started with the industrial revolution. It can be argued that the typewriter was the first step in office automation. Although American William Austin Burt patented a machine called the “Typographer” in 1829, typewriters only really became commonplace after the introduction of Christopher Sholes’ version of the typewriter in 1870.
Typewriters were quickly followed by a host of inventions aimed at making the workplace less tedious and more efficient. Ironically, most people could write faster than text could be produced on early typewriters. Devices, such as stenotype machines, duplicators, tabulating machines, and various others were rolled out relatively rapidly but generally in a purely mechanical, evolutionary process.
The xerographic process, which was invented by Chester Carlson in 1938, heralded a change in the pace of office automation. Prints were initially made using a six-step, entirely manual process. Between 1939 and 1944, Carlson, after patenting his process, was turned down by over 20 companies he offered to sell the rights to. This included IBM and General Electric, neither company believing that there was a market for copiers of any significance.
The Xerox 914 was the first successful commercial plain paper copier which, in 1959, revolutionized the document copying industry. The machine was complex. It required a large amount of technical support (in other words, it broke down a lot) and it had a tendency to catch fire when it overheated. In fact, the Xerox company provided a “scorch eliminator” (a small fire extinguisher) with each copier. Despite its shortcomings, it was capable of making seven black-and-white plain paper copies a minute and was a commercial success for Xerox.
Automation in the Digital Age
The advent of the personal computer was the technology that truly enabled modern office automation. The Kenbak-1, released in early 1971, is considered by the Computer History Museum to be the world’s first personal computer. Invented by John Blankenbaker of Kenbak Corporation in 1970 and released for sale early in 1971, only around 40 machines were built and sold before the company folded in 1973. Today, machines with globally familiar operating systems and graphical user interfaces dominate computer systems.
The revolution has been so complete and has found its way into so many areas of business that it would be inconceivable to go without them. It is difficult to find any businesses that do not use at least one commercial computer business application in the course of their daily work. Computers are commonly used to maintain financial records, control inventory, and manage payroll information and records as well as a host of other business information.
Information technology that began as handy, but not essential, business tools in the 1980s has evolved into a critical priority requirement in the office of today. It has become a prerequisite for doing business. The digitisation of business information is the backbone of office automation, which only became possible when networked desktop computers started appearing on office desktops.
Today and Into the Future
Office automation is now the process of monitoring data flow through a work environment, usually with little or no human intervention, inaccuracies, and errors. Automation employs tools to create, collect, store, analyse, share, and replicate office data that is required to accomplish the routine tasks and processes of business effectively. Office administration has been fundamentally changed by automation technology. Memos are now emails, filing cabinets are now “in the cloud”, and the clock card machine is now a biometric scanner.
Biometric tools are expected to adapt to monitor the activities of personnel in the work-from-home environment. Office automation aims to make critical business information available to everyone whose function requires the information. To achieve this, every device, be it a laptop, smart phone, printer, scanner, or copier needs to be accessible on the network to the appropriate personnel. Workflows need to be automated, so that the environment is not merely digitised but is in fact automated.
Consequently, local area networks are the essential information technology infrastructure on which office automation runs. Automated workflow creation is typically underpinned by automation software tools either created in-house or more commonly written by third-party software vendors.
An automation system should integrate a company’s databases, financial management and accounting software, and sales and customer retention systems. Successful automation systems are designed with the business user in mind and should strengthen and streamline existing processes. In the future, as the workflow tools become more and more automated and intelligent, less and less staff will be occupied with tedious tasks that ad no real value to the business goals of the company.