Office Automation and Group Collaboration

Office Automation and Group Collaboration In my company, the imaging technology is used for the office automation purposes and the Lotus-Notes is used for the group collaboration purposes. Below I will describe the use of these technologies in my company. The imaging technology has been useful to my company as it is able to eliminate the need for the paper in many areas.

By the elimination of the paper in several business processes, my company has been able to significantly improve its performance by reducing the need to re-keying most of information in the paper format. Tasks, which were previously done one after another, now can be done simultaneously, because imaging technology can provide simultaneous access to documents. So, multiple people can do their jobs at the same time. This kind of access, which allows people working in parallel, offers considerable improvements to the overall processing time and the quality of the product.

Imaging can also increase efficiency by reducing "bottlenecks" where document processing slows down because of the difficulties of moving the physical documents, as moving paper documents within organizations is a time consuming process. Imaging also provides much needed disaster recovery capabilities for existing manual systems.

This benefit is largely unrecognized, since many companies do not recognize the value of such factors Imaging technology provides the company with improved management of the records -- something which senior management and records managers have wanted for years, but found difficult or impossible to collect in a manual environment. As a case in point, most companies are using redundant filing, and other expensive strategies to deal with making information more accessible. However, as the time goes these filing systems become expensive and difficult to be accessed easily.

The use of image technology can aid in saving the records of information and determine exactly what the needs for access and retrieval are. Finally, the use of the imaging technology has been quite critical in the redesign of business processes. With business process redesign, the company has been able to eliminate number of redundant business processes. The biggest problem that my company faced in the use of the image technology was finding a justifiable cost of the imaging technology. Finding a justified cost is important but often difficult.

Thus, in many business cases imaging systems have been based on "estimates," rather than fully justifiable numbers. If the business case is designed to "cost justify" the imaging system, then it becomes important for the company that it should be able to use the quantifiable numbers to justify the costs rather than use the just estimates. In doing so, managers are required to have a detailed analysis of the current business processes, a solid understanding of how the work is being done, and determine what the new process should be.

Once management has been able to model the company processes, the company can get an opportunity to model new processes, and to examine the effects of various solutions to the existing issues. This step allows the managers to model the alternatives, evaluate them, and decide on improvements to the current process. Then, based on your in-depth knowledge of the current processes, management can clearly determine the costs and benefits of the use of new imaging technology. Collaborative Technology Use: The uses of a collaborative system such as Lotus-Notes are many.

My company is not only taking the advantages of the Lotus-Notes by adding value to person interactions, but also the company is able to gain advantages through work sharing, time and location optimization, information and work flow management, and content and context management. The use of collaborative tool has become serious for the businesses because companies are making more than a passing commitment to interconnecting the diverse external and internal elements of their organizations. As a result, collaborative tools are slowly gaining momentum in many companies.

Collaborative tools are more than offering the simple interconnection of two users. These tools provide the advantages of interaction along with the feedback: one-way information transfer is insufficient. Neither telephone conversations nor facsimile interchanges are groupware, because the applications merely transfer information and neither store it nor manipulate it. An e-mail system, in contrast, can be considered as a collaborative tool. On the other hand, Lotus-Notes is considered as a richer medium because it offers several other work flow advantages to the company that are absent.