AUTOMATION, OR THE USE OF COMPUTERS TO automate and facilitate operations within an organization, is becoming hype these days. Every organization, be that from private or public sector, from corporate sector to academics, is striving to make use of latest technologies to improve their services and be more efficient.

Automation certainly helps in improving the working and helps in effective decision-making. Progress of any process or function can be easily monitored, then corrected and improved using automation tools. Similarly, analysis reports, progress reports and executive summaries can be easily generated. All this helps the decision makers better understand their functions and improve the overall efficiency.

Talking of automation in academic sector we see that educational institutes, such as universities, colleges and even schools can benefit a lot from automation. First a lot of redundant data and information can be reduced. This will save effort and time of all the staff, students and the parents. Think of a situation where a student registers in an institute, be that a school university or college. They are faced with the hassle of filling up so many forms, submitting them at many counters to finally find out that one of his/her personal information was misspelled and have to go round all the activities again.

Automation will make life much easier; providing all information at only one desk can be sufficient if all administrative departments share the information. The student or parent will only have to fill one form with the basic information. That would be automatically transferred to the concerned department and the finance department. Then with efficient software making of ID cards, fee slips, confirming registration would be just a click away. And that is just the beginning, once the information is available, it can facilitate absolutely every one concerned. The teachers would get error-free automatically generated attendance sheets. They would be able to enter the grades and progress of the students in the central repository to automatically generate grades. Once that information is available, the over all progress of the student throughout his degree or course could easily be analyzed. This could help the teacher better guide the students in their academic life. Teachers could upload all their reading material and help that would be available to the students at all time.
Parents through this automated system can evaluate the performance of their children while staying at home. The information could be made available to them through a website that could inform them how good or bad their child is doing in quizzes, assignments or exams. All this could be done without the hassle of coming to the institute and waiting for the availability of concerned teachers and other staff.

Automation will make life much easier; providing all information at only one desk can be sufficient if all administrative departments share the information.

Students can benefit from the automation by having access to all the important dates; all course related material and information. They could get their registration done without filing many forms; they can get fee slips generated automatically. Any student can get any information about himself/herself just by logging on to the system.

Last but the most important ones to benefit from automation would be the administrative and executive staff. They would be able to see summaries and reports of almost anything. They can get the number of students in a class, section, specialization, department or discipline. The overall performance, the increase or decrease in the students, the strength of a department are all reports that would be easy to generate and would take lots of time to be made manually. Similarly many analysis tools are available that can analyze and then display the results in a very easy to understand manner. All this contributes towards effective design making.

The biggest benefit that all the stakeholders share is that all the information cannot be forged. Whatever numbers or figures anyone gets to see are correct and no one can temper them.

The biggest benefit that all the stakeholders share is that all the information cannot be forged. Whatever numbers or figures anyone gets to see are correct and no one can temper them. The accountability is facilitated and the processes become transparent, for some this is one big disadvantage that automation gives. Another is that chances of damage to data is reduced, a paper file in more vulnerable than data on a CD or backup tape, or even one that is uploaded to some place.

All these are the advantages an organization especially an academic organization can avail from automation. But one thing that cannot be overlooked is the fact that all the automation should be done using a robust software and strong backup mechanism. Without which the precious data, time and effort would go wasted.

The writer is Lecturer in the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at Bahria University, Islamabad. He is currently doing MS in Computer Engineering from CASE (Center for Advanced Studies in Engineering) Islamabad. He has special interest in Software development particularly database development/administration, web development and client/server applications.
He can be reached at rizwan@bci.edu.pk.