Automation isn’t a new concept; its most obvious early example was the creation of the assembly line by Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company. Mass-production of a product using a formulaic approach in creating a product (or end result) in the most efficient way, in this case the automobile, made the manufacture of a complicated item exponentially streamlined.
Innovation in the automation of processes allowed products to be produced en masse at a significantly reduced price, drastically increasing the affordability of items previously available only to the wealthy (while improving potential margins for the manufacturer).
Ingenuity and innovation have served to create more affordable products and services world-wide, with the increase of powerful, yet affordable, technologies making them widely available to all industries. Leveraging of cloud-based technologies such as Scout™ has made many of these technologies scalable and therefore substantially more affordable to all sizes of business.
The advent of ‘big-data’ has been both a blessing and a curse to many companies in the digital space, giving them access to increasing amounts of information, but many lack the ability to sift through it all to find what is of importance for them to be able to make the right decisions for their business.
The correct interpretation and understanding of that data has been a pain-point of numerous companies, many not knowing where to start or how to action the findings once they have them. Added to which, what do you do as a business when you find out you may have been going about things the wrong way?
Long-established methods of superficial data-interpretation may have been incorrect, or the company is not agile enough in its arrangement to be able to be reactive to paradigm-shifting intelligence.
For all those that have taken strides to use this data in a responsible way, for the betterment of their services, production chains, compliance and bottom lines, there are others who took advantage of the lack of policy and structure for nefarious means.
The sharing of information had outpaced the abilities for lawmakers to keep up with the potential exposure and corruption of this data, forcing many governments to make sweeping resolutions to potential threats that these technologies may expose, many of which have forced businesses (both rightly and wrongly) to drastically change the way they handle and process data, often at great cost.
These constant states of flux have meant that businesses find it harder not only to get the right information, but to disseminate the information that allows them to make quick and compliant decisions. This is where cutting-edge, cloud-based technology such as Scout™ can make a huge difference to any organisation looking to remain efficient and compliant in an ever-changing business and regulatory landscape.