Toward the Electronic Office (1981) / Chapter Skim
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Office Systems Innovations in the Bank
Office Systems Innovations in the Bank
Pages 71-84
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From page 71... ...
The reason we have gone ahead in this automation area, properly termed as office automation, is to improve professional productivity and keep the focus on that; not on making the office more efficient in terms of word processing or getting the secretary more effective, even though as a by-product those things do happen as well. About two and one-half years ago when we started implementing some of the electronic mail and information retrieval systems, three members of my staff and I analyzed how we would feel operating in an environment that we were going to suggest and impose, or help guide, 7l
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From page 72... ...
The whole orientation in our organization in moving towards office automation is location independence. How can I operate in a fully functional fashion being anywhere I choose to be?
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From page 73... ...
What we tried to do was reorient what was office automation. What we were really saying was let us address the work patterns of the professionals, people engaged in reading and writing, talking and listening, et cetera.
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From page 74... ...
As the gentleman from Avon highlighted, we all have backlogged computer projects. If I brought this overall project two years ago to my management staff and said, I would like to spend $5 or $l0 million to study office automation and make the offices more efficient, they would say very clearly, go back and do the work you are behind on, quit fooling around with the future stuff.
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From page 75... ...
But, we did them separately, without saying, here is our overall strategy on how to improve professional productivity. As we moved ahead with quick pilots, we then got in the process of having people' justify them from our user perspective in terms of putting the pieces in place.
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From page 76... ...
What I mean by one-way complete messages is, you called me and left a full message and there was no need for me to return the call -- it was just information, one-directional -- and there was no need to call back and I knew exactly what you wanted to communicate. For example, my data center manager, after a bad evening, preferred talking to the machine than to me.
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From page 77... ...
We think that moving people into both of these directions is critical to getting everything electronically captured. We, at the bank, have had dictation going fairly aggressively and in general we have been moving towards remote dictation using the telephone to dictate to a remote word processing center.
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From page 78... ...
We feel there is an excellent potential of using qualified people that are tied to their homes or choose to be there. We have made the underlying assumption that equipment will be cheap enough that you become indifferent to whether it is being used eight hours a day or six hours a day.
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From page 79... ...
People are raising questions on can you really transmit information in and out of different countries. Restriction of transborder data flow, from our perspective, would be a disaster and hopefully people here or someone in government is taking a very aggressive stand to help us in this area.
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From page 80... ...
Now, rather than creating exception computer reports that are specifically formatted, let the mail system be your in-box and when the computer is programmed with limits or guidelines on report suspenses let it cut a memo and send it to people saying, "Hey, you have an expense statement that is overdue, you have this overdue." We are looking into starting to expand that notion. We expect that the area of computer generated mail will probably be a larger function over time because there is a lot of exception and control reporting that is desired.
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From page 81... ...
We found that it is more important to get people using electronic mail that are willing to use it and that give you meaningful feedback on how it should be improved, rather than theoreticians sitting back telling you how you should do your mail and nothing happening because you are not learning anything directly. IRIS: another area that we investigated was information retrieval and the big desire to have information at our fingertips.
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From page 82... ...
I have my data center performance project information, anything that we need to manage our area we put up under IRIS. We are moving towards -- and I don't want to lead you to believe that we have eliminated paper in the organization -- we are moving towards people thinking hard about current generations of systems that we are upgrading right now; they are talking about reducing or eliminating a lot of the paper they use to get.
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From page 83... ...
Now, if you have a terminal where you can view all of the information you want to, you might now consider voice conferencing and picture conferencing. In the voice conferencing end, we are now using some picture phones.
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From page 84... ...
The only office the telephone company has in Chicago, is starting to work towards saving some people travel time. We are just trying to find out how people feel.
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