Automation has quickly become a ubiquitous technology throughout industries and regions, with a broad diversity of programs and tools helping to streamline a wealth of core operational processes for performance improvements and efficiency gains. Although only a select group of industries were once aggressively pursuing automation tools, provisioning strategies have started to lean in this direction on a larger scale in more recent years.
Some of the main drivers of demand thus far have been the mass digitization of file management, a rise in hosted IT services and frameworks through the cloud, increased market competition following the recession and diversifying corporate needs. Looking from a broader angle, the private sector has simply become more technologically dependent in the past decade than any other time, with industries that were once entirely reliant on manpower beginning to leverage advanced hardware and software for their operational procedures.
In many ways, this type of evolution in the private sector has led to an increased prevalence of chief information officers in mid-market and large enterprises, while these individuals are playing a more central role in decision-making across their respective organizations. The rest of the C-Suite must ensure that their CIOs are involved in communications and technology-related processes, while the tech leaders themselves should be leveraging solutions to streamline their core responsibilities.
CIOs take control
Information Age recently reported that automation software has become a critical component for CIOs in the past few years, affirming that the sheer complexity of systems and arrays that are involved in a modern IT framework has stimulated demand for tools that begin to cut back on the time it takes to oversee all operations. Internal pressure points are far from being the only matters that these leaders need to deal with as well, especially considering how quickly regulators have started to move on legislative overhauls.
According to the news provider, the health care industry serves as a strong example of just how difficult it can be to simultaneously deploy new tools and systems swiftly while remaining within the boundaries of regulatory compliance. For one, the combination of the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act's privacy and security requirements with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act's electronic medical record system demands can be enough to drive a leader in this industry nuts.
On top of these complexities, the source noted that the U.S. health care system has started to undergo a massive shift in diagnosis code designations, moving from ICD-9 standards to ICD-10, which will effectively expand the number of codes from 14,000 to 69,000. Likewise, Information Age noted that procedure codes will increase from 13,000 to 85,000 once this shift is completed.
At the end of the day, though, the news provider stated that the best way forward appears to be automation software, especially the most advanced and reliable products on the market, which can free CIOs, as well as key members of IT, from extraneous and arduous tasks, thus allowing them to focus more on strategic oversight.
Health care and beyond
Virtually every industry in the United States and abroad is going through similar evolutions that have been highly demanding and place a significant amount of strain on the average IT department. As such, the applications of automation software are vast, and companies that have struggled to gain a firm handle on the complexity of new systems because of various resource constraints can likely find a significant level of help from automation tools.
For everything from invoice processing and data capture to workflow and beyond, automation can significantly improve the efficiency, productivity and engagement rates of any organization.
