Toward the Electronic Office (1981) / Chapter Skim
Currently Skimming:
Avon's Office System
Avon's Office System
Pages 55-70
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From page 55... ...
The major corporate objectives that I am faced with are to improve profit margins, enhance product line appeal, and provide service support to those marketing representatives. One of the first things I would like to do is talk to you about the organization within Avon products because this is a key issue for a lot of corporations and government organizations right now.
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From page 56... ...
We will get into an initial survey and if at that point it becomes obvious tnat ADRS-2, or CMS, or something like that is the obvious solution for the user, we will hand that project over to our development people. If it is not so obvious, if perhaps a distributed office system approach tnat type of thing becomes apparent versus ADRS-2, we will proceed along and get involved with a feasibility study.
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From page 57... ...
The idea was to have a small, limited membership, corporate, government and the educational community and to meet on a regular basis and to share practical experiences and ideas, and to have that membership evolve because we felt that it would be a dynamic environment and it should change, but it should always be manageable in terms of the size of the group. Our objectives were to influence office automation hardware, software development, standards; identify common problems and not reinvent the wheel five times; influence management direction as to what this was all about; and broaden the understanding of management and the people involved in this regarding office automation and also the users; and to establish guidelines and standards for achieving an evolutionary path in office automation.
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From page 58... ...
It is centered around communications and the key to it to us, in terms of the pay-offs, are decision support systems: providing automation tools to those people who are making major decisions for the corporation; not looking at secretarial productivity where perhaps you will net five or six percent as far as total secretarial cost opportunity and you might net that one-eighth of a secretary. That is really not a hard dollar savings.
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From page 59... ...
Let's find out about it." So we talked a little bit about some of our concerns Essentially, they are the same as most large organizations: rapidly rising administration costs, increasing personnel requirements, inefficient distribution systems, paper proliferation, inaccessible information, increasing reporting requirements both internally and externally, and, of course, the sorting and retrieval of paper, which in our case was becoming increasingly expensive; more and more information requirements, more and more cost, more and more personnel and flat white collar productivity. In our company the thing that gets management excited is increasing corporate profitability opportunities.
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From page 60... ...
We wanted to know about the interrelationships between users in different departments. We wanted to address administrative work solutions and needs of both professionals and secretarials, as I said, with information on their current information requirements, information requirements that are needed that have not yet been identified, and information requirements that are not needed, as well as future information requirements.
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From page 61... ...
A very good program, internally, to move people. You will see that people were with us a number of years, yet in their current position for a very short time, indicating a good internal personnel program.
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From page 62... ...
We have decent records management programs in our securities area, in our tax department, in those areas where formalization is required, but on a general basis, we found a strong need for a general corporate program for records management. One of the most interesting set of statistics that emerged was that only 56 percent of the file drawers are actually utilized, and of that, about half are utilized for business materials.
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From page 63... ...
The study also indicated additional requirements were needed for copying and duplication needs; manuals were found that were not used, that were out-of-date, and people were commonly calling specific individuals to ask a question because they hadn't maintained their manuals. We found an obvious need for an internal education program for file maintenance, how to conduct meetings and document distribution.
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From page 64... ...
The delta between available development resources and maintenance resource expenditures becomes larger and larger, and essentially you start to push valid users away and the group starts to look like a traditional data processing development staff unable to touch projects for l2 or more months. From an organizational point of view, we stated a need for a corporate guidance consultant responsibility for strategy and planning.
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From page 65... ...
The key here on text processing for us was user transparency, flexibility, programmability, the ability to provide a basic compiler to a user who has that need, and the ability to have 2780 communications protocol or 274l communications protocol, again, depending on that user's need. We put together a corporate records management task force on the basis of the findings regarding our files and our problems in that area.
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From page 66... ...
More recently, we decided to install a Northern Telecom SL-l that can handle both voice and data simultaneously and this portends all sorts of things in terms of the distribution o' information, including digitized voice as well as other digitizeu information of all sorts. Information utilities.
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From page 67... ...
We are working with people like Raytheon, Compugraphic and Harris and a host of others, companies who are looking at how to build a total integrated printing system. We want a unique system, with very sophisticated color graphics, with user transparent terminals at the front-end; that copy-writers and art directors feel comfortable with; with communications to various data bases that reside on DEC equipment or IBM equipment at the front end.
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From page 68... ...
I think it is going to be as revolutionary as the word processing enviroment was four years ago. I think the key summary point is the need for the proper organization to manage all this on an ongoing basis.
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From page 69... ...
The largest pay-off will be in management decision support systems. There is an absolute need for standards in terms of system compatibility.
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