Automating anything (on Windows), anywhere
PC World | at | by Mike
Automation in IT will always be a big deal because there's always going to be that situation where you have to do something obnoxiously repetitive such as grab data from that Web page, save it into this file, load that file into this application, format the data this way and e-mail it out to a list of people and do that entire process every hour during the day but not on weekends.
There's another benefit to automation that is often overlooked: accuracy. Take the above scenario: It would be pretty much guaranteed that a person trying to do that eight times per day, five days per week, 50 weeks per year would make mistakes. And that's the thing; mistakes cost money so automation not only reduces or eliminates manpower costs, it saves the cost of ****ups.