Related Titles
- Full Description
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Office Automation 2.0 is the essential guide to office automation for managers and IT professionals whose organizations are charting their path into the post-PC era. It drills down into the enterprise automation strategies and tactics appropriate to post-PC technologies such as virtual desktop infrastructure, mobile clients, and cloud services. This book teaches that rollouts of the latest enterprise-class technologies cannot produce business value unless management ensures that the front office is trained to use them correctly, and that end-user practices and IT processes are dynamically and efficiently coupled in the organizational culture.
Based on his decades of consultancy to corporate clients on how to retool IT infrastructure to drive business value, Jon Toigo provides practical guidance for innovative managers who are seeking to make every automation investment dollar count toward the three key metrics of business value: cost-containment, risk reduction, and improved productivity. Marshaling many real-world examples from his experience, Toigo shows how 21st-century automation solutions, if they are to succeed, must be designed and implemented to span all departments of your enterprise, tying IT process with front-office practice.
Office Automation 2.0 teaches office managers, business strategists, and IT professionals
- How to design and implement office automation solutions that will most efficiently harness post-PC technologies such as virtual desktop infrastructure, mobile clients, and cloud services to their particular business needs and constraints.
- How to train up their front-office personnel to extract maximum productivity and optimal user experience from the new IT processes that bear on their respective jobs.
- How to transform their organization’s culture so that IT and end users pull in tandem to drive business value.
What you’ll learn
Readers of Office Automation 2.0 will learn how to
- Identify realistic opportunities for office automation, define requirements, and create objectives with measurable standards for building, implementing, and evaluating projects.
- Evaluate the fit of new post-PC technologies for office automation project requirements.
- Create a narrative around automation projects that will resonate with business managers and office staff, setting expectations and engaging them in project success.
- Use new technologies to support resource sharing and improved productivity, especially at the front-office user end.
- Design and operationalize interdepartmental feedback mechanisms to foster automation solutions that will continuously evolve to optimize enterprise productivity over time.
- Ensure resiliency and continuity of office automation services in a world where downtime translates into significant cost to the business.
Who this book is for
Office Automation 2.0 is for business and IT planners who are seeking a coherent strategy for successful and business-savvy office automation. It is of special interest to IT administrators tasked with finding ways to streamline business practices by delivering automation improvements that can maintain and improve the productivity of leaner staffing models. It is also a primer for up-and-coming IT professionals who need to understand the common challenges confronting office workers in contemporary business, the impact of blurring job roles in terms of automation requirements, and the capabilities and limitations of still-evolving post-PC technologies.
- Table of Contents
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Table of Contents
[Note: This table of contents is tentative. Its organization and wording may change in the course of writing, but its core matter will remain.]
Chapter 1: Retooling Your Office for the 21st Century (25 pp)
o Office Automation 1.0: The Slow Devaluation
o Office Automation 2.0: The Rapid Revaluation
o Strategic Criteria for Retooling Your Office
o Beware Fouling New Skins with Old Vinegar
Chapter 2: Reconnecting IT and Your Office (25 pp)
o It’s Not All about the Infrastructure
o Harnessing Technology to Your Business Value Stream
Chapter 3: Developing an Automation Project for Your 21st-Century Office (40 pp)
o Analyze Your Existing IT Processes in Relation to Your Office Practices
o Analyze Your Existing Office Practices in Relation to Your Business Requirements
o Identify and Test Potential Improvements in End Use of Your Existing IT Capabilities
o Evaluate New Technology Options for Improving Your Office Productivity
o Design and Compare Automation Scenarios
o Compare Automation Scenarios with Value of Optimizing Use of Existing Processes
o Set Objectives, Responsibilities, and Expectations for the Automation Project
o Apply Standards and Metrics to the New Processes and Practices
o Minimize Risk of Business Disruption with Phased Rollout
o Set up End-User Training and Support Programs That Inculcate Best Practices
o Case Studies of Office Automation Projects
Chapter 4: End-User Training: The Key to Realizing the Business Value of Office Automation (40 pp)
o Reshape Your IT and Management Culture to Serve End-User Productivity
o Train Up Your Front Office to Remediate Basic Skills and Learn New Processes
o Test Your End Users for Bad Habits, Skill Deficits, and Outmoded Practices
o Vet Your Front Office Protocols for Incompatibility, Inefficiency, and Irrelevance
o Training Dos and Don’ts for Management
o Reshaping Your Front Office Culture to Engage IT Collaboratively
o Improving User Experience to Raise Business Efficiency, ROI, and Staff Retention
Chapter 5: Business Application Basics (40 pp)
o Fix, Build, Buy, or Source?
o Should Every Business Process Be Supported by a Business Application?
o Local Control or Centralized Management and Configuration?
o Managing the Data Co-Generated by Process and Application
o App Performance: What Counts in User Experience
o App Delivery Options
Chapter 6: Current Application Hosting and Delivery (40 pp)
o Client-Side: The Desktop OS as a “Container”
o Apps on Demand: Hosting Models
o Cloud Apps and Nebulous Thinking
Chapter 7: Essential Considerations in an Office Automation Project (40 pp)
o Mobility
o Security
o Disaster Recovery
o Browsers
o Transports
Chapter 8: Maintaining an Office Automation Project (30 pp)
o Fostering Adoption
o Sustaining Funding
o Encouraging Back Office Support
o Measuring Success
Chapter 9: Office Automation in the Long Term: Evolution and Adaptation (30 pp)
o Who Will Manage Change over Time?
o Client Agnosticism
o Infrastructure Agnosticism
o Perfect versus Practical
o Users as Stakeholders: Leveraging Social Networks for Smart Change
Chapter 10: Conclusion (25 pp)
o Measuring the Business Value of Office Automation: Tangibles and Intangibles
o A Vision for the 21st Century Office: Present Options and Future Directions - Errata
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