- Email: [email protected]
Office automation in practice
Officeautomation in practice by BARRY SHEFFIELD
T
wo years ago Plessey Management Services Limited (PMSL) set up an internal office automation service, Office Plus, for use within the Plessey group. There are currently around 350 users, many of them senior executives, across all Plessey sites throughout the UK and this number is now accelerating rapidly. The benefits have proved to be so important that it is now clear that office automation will quickly become the normal medium for internal correspondence throughout the group, replacing virtually all paper memoranda - and also supplanting a significant proportion of telephone calls. The service is also used extensively from home by a number of senior executives.
Abstract: An organization with a larger number of engineers has introduced office automation to increase productivity. A committmentto using the system 100% with the service company has resulted in several distinct benefits; such as faster communication and decision-making, speedier turnroundfor proposals to customers and the ability to deal with mail away from base. The electronic mail facility has proved the mostpopular, with calendar and personal computing less well used, and the electronic noticeboard hardly used at all. Problems included lack of time to learn the system. Keywords: data processing, office automation, electronic mail. Barry Sheffield is director of management services for the Plessey group.
18
0011-684W85/020018-03$03.00
0
Office Plus is an internal bureau service which runs on two dedicated DEC Vax computers in the Plessey Computer Centre at Addlestone in Surrey and can be accessed from all Plessey sites in the UK through the Plessey private wideband network and from overseas locations via dialup. The service is based on DEC AllIn-One software (with a number of important modifications to meet Plessey requirements) which provides a store-and-forward mailbox facility together with a comprehensive personal filing and information retrieval system and shared word processing facilities. The two Vax machines are linked to the corporate telex store-and-forward computer at Ilford to provide all Office Plus users with an on-the-deck telex facility. Users may also access a wide range of personal computing facilities and applications programs. As well as providing tools for textual communication and information storage, the system provides access to information extracted from a variety of external information sources and disseminated company-wide via a videotex service. One of the major aims of Office Plus was to accommodate a wide choice of workstations to enable users to choose the workstation most appropriate to their own needs. The system is currently being accessed using personal computers, word processors and other terminals made by Plessey Office Systems, DEC, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Wang, ACT, BBC, Apple,
1985 Butterworth
& Co (Publishers)
Ltd.
Prime, Tandy.
AES,
Lexitron,
Epson
and
The Plessey group Plessey is a group of high-tech electronics companies with a total turnover in excess of &l OOOM. The group employs approximately 40 000 people and is subdivided into about 20 autonomous businesses, each of which has the responsibility for selecting its own computer systems (albeit under the watchful eye of a corporate management services function). There are five major computer suppliers to the group: DEC, Hewlett Packard, ICL, Microdata and Sperry.
Plessey Management Services Ltd (PMSL) PMSL is a Plessey subsidiary with a turnover of around &12M and a staff of 300. It sells its services to other members of the group and to some extent externally to non-Plessey customers. It operates a large mainframe bureau with a turnover of &5M and is responsible for the Plessey private telecommunications network which links all Plessey sites. It also incorporates a software house with 90 staff and a printing and publicity services organization.
Justification for office automation The original justification for setting up an office automation service was that Plessey employs some 11000 professionals (mainly engineers) who do not have their own secretaries and typically are able to spend no more than 40% of their time on creative work. The remainder of their time tends to be taken up with meetings, report writing, telephone calls, travel and other forms of administrative activity. It was argued that by providing electronic secretarial facilities it would be possible to improve their productivity. If their productivity could be increased from 40% to 50% it was estimated that an improvement of
data processing
off ice automation &25M a year in profit would be possible. A further reason for setting up a corporate office automation service was to preempt the uncontrolled growth of incompatible electronic mail systems which would have been inevitable if office automation had been left to individual initiatives within the separate business units. The DEC software product All-InOne was chosen as the basis for the system, mainly because it is a world leader in the sphere of office automation, providing comprehensive and easy-to-use facilities for an office worker. It can also readily be tailored to specific needs and it provides relatively easy interfaces for non-DEC workstations. A further factor in the choice of AllIn-One was that it is Vax-based. This is a matter of some importance in an organization possessing some 50-60 Vax computers. It was also considered extremely important that DEC had clearly embarked on a major mainstream development programme aimed at maintaining its undoubted market leadership in the field of office automation.
PMSL as a guinea pig One of the first actions was to commit to using Office Plus 100% inside PMSL. Since mid-1983 all internal correspondence has been carried out bv electronic means. With the benefit oi 18 months’ correspondence avaiiable on disc files, the system now provides a very powerful reference medium. All managers have become used to looking at VDU screens instead of paper and everyone has worked out their own ‘way of operating in this new enviroxlment.
Office automation in practice Experience has shown that by far the most useful aspect of thle service is the electronic mail and filing facility, coupled where appropriate with word processing. The link to the telex
~0127no 2
march 1985
computer and the followup system have also proved to be extremely useful. The Corporate Information Service, based on videotex, is intended as an ‘electronic noticeboard’ for the use of anyone with information to display widely inside the group. However, its use has so far been disappointingly small. Calendar management and personal computing are also not enormously popular. The problem with calendar management is that the software available for maintaining personal diaries and scheduling meetings is not yet sophisticated enough to meet the needs of the busy executive. The ability to transmit text from any Office Plus workstation to any one of a variety of phototypesetters and laser printers has also not yet been fully exploited, but there are signs that this is an area where considerable progress is likely in the near future.
means that user guides and even help screens are of little value. Accordingly, considerable effort has been put into making Office Plus as selfexplanatory as possible and providing an effective support service. New users frequently express concern about the privacy of information stored in the system. However, when the sophisticated security precautions exercised at the computer centre and the elaborate protection provided by the software controlling the whole system are explained, most users realise that the security is many times better than that of the somewhat crude but accepted method of typing information on paper, putting it in an envelope and passing it through many pairs of hands to a recipient who subsequently stores it in a flimsy metal filing cabinet. Another unexpected deterrent has proved to be the problem of poor spelling. Fortunately, the spelling check facility built into the system rapidly dispels this concern.
Problems encountered Keyboard shyness has proved in practice to be less of a problem than expected. Most people seem more than willing to indulge in two-finger typing for short or urgent messages because of the considerable benefit of instant communication. Related to this is the problem of the procedures used by a manager and his secretary. Generally speaking, experience shows that if the manager is equipped with a dumb terminal and the secretary with a word processor, the manager will normally need to use the keyboard only for urgent or short messages. Lengthy text is dictated for the secretary to enter, ready for final checking and editing on the manager’s own terminal. Possibiy the most difficult problem encountered in practice has been the fact that a busy executive finds it difficult to spare enough time to learn the system, easy though it is. This places ease of use at a premium and
Lessons learned In expanding the use of office automation throughout the group it was decided at the outset that the surest and fastest way would be to sell the system first to top management. This seems to be proving effective as, having introduced Office Plus to most of the main board executive directors, it is now rapidly spreading throughout the company hierarchy. An interesting phenomenon is that frequently executives see a demonstration of Office Plus and then ask to have their secretaries connected to it, but not to have a terminal themselves. Experience shows that if this is too easily allowed the system tends to be used simply as a form of high-speed telex, which of course results in the full benefits not being achieved. It is very important that executives should have terminals on their own desks, even though the bulk of their input is via dictation to a secretary.
19
It is also found that the benefits are more easily gained if new users concentrate initially on electronic mail, leaving word processing and personal computing until they have become proficient in using mail. However, many professionals already use personal computing extensively and in such cases all that is necessary is to connect their own machine to the network. The problem mentioned earlier of users being unable to spare the time to learn how to use the system properly highlights the problem of training and support. Obviously the real answer is to provide a system which is so selfexplanatory and so foolproof that instruction is unnecessary, but as no office automation system is available today anywhere near which approaches this ideal, there is a need for good inhouse training courses. This is especially necessary for secretaries. Generally speaking, a welltrained secretary can help managers to learn how to use the system on a gradual basis. Nevertheless, for senior executives it is still necessary to provide an intermittent one-for-one handholding service and a surprisingly large number of support staff have proved to be needed for this. Perhaps the most important lesson of all is the need for a willingness to become totally dependent on office automation as the basic means of business communization. No user should ever normally find it necessary to write a letter on paper to another person who is a user of the system. Nor should it be necessary ever to file documents on paper if they have been either sent or received electronically. Frequently, new users are willing to use Office Plus for informal messages but still insist on sending important correspondence in the traditional way. Obviously this, to a very large extent, is defeating the whole objective of office automation and a major training objective is to overcome this problem.
20
Benefits The original justification for Office Plus was its potential for improving office productivity. However, experience in Plessey shows that the benefits which can be gained in terms of improving managerial effectiveness through faster co~unication may well be even greater than the financial benefits obtainable from improved office productivity. The instant communication which Office Plus provides, accelerates the speed of decision-making dramatically and the impact of this in terms of operating a business in highly competitive markets is very significant. The speed with which it is possible to pass documents between locations anywhere in the organization has the very practical effect of enabling customer proposals and other documents to be redrafted rapidly and, if necessary, published in a matter of hours rather than weeks using manual methods. Again this is of considerable importance when competing in highly competitive world markets. The availability of the system on all Plessey sites through the corporate network means that an executive can deal with correspondence promptly even when away from base. This is another facility which contributes significantly to efficient business operations. The combined effect of these factors can be a very worthwhile improvement in business competitiveness . Future developments Office Plus currently runs on two dedicated Vax computers at Addlestone, but it is intended to extend it onto local Vax computers in a number of Plessey locations, networking them together so that compatible facilities and a consistent user index are available to all. A forthcoming version of Office Plus will include integrated voice messages. This means that voice mes-
sages will be handled in exactly the same way as text messages, with a single filing and retrieval mechanism covering both. This level of integration will eventually also apply to composite including documents image as well as text and voice. Document scanning and optical character recognition, already a practical proposition, will have a useful part to play as a means of entering documents received from external sources. Initially as a separate venture, but with an eye to ultimate integration with Office Plus, videoconference facilities are being planned for linking Plessep sites. To achieve this the latest developments in bandwidth compression will be employed. Considerable development work is being done on enhancing the document transfer facilities, with the aim of providing good word processing compatibility across a wide range of personal computers and word processors . Other goals include the integration of facsimile and the use of artificial intelligence to make the system capable of learning how to communicate more effectively with individual people. The advent of cellular radio has exciting prospects in relation to office automation as it will make it possible to be permanently in touch with business affairs through the medium of a telephone carried in the car (and eventually in the pocket) and also capable of transmitting and receiving electronic mail. Overall, these developments are leading rapidly towards a new and exciting era when office automation will be the normal medium for all Plessey business comm~ication. Management Services Limited executives who are habitual users of Office Plus find it difficult to imagine how it was possible to operate effectively 0 without it. The Plessey Company pie, Vicarage Lane, flford, Essex fG1 4AQ, UK.
data processing
T
wo years ago Plessey Management Services Limited (PMSL) set up an internal office automation service, Office Plus, for use within the Plessey group. There are currently around 350 users, many of them senior executives, across all Plessey sites throughout the UK and this number is now accelerating rapidly. The benefits have proved to be so important that it is now clear that office automation will quickly become the normal medium for internal correspondence throughout the group, replacing virtually all paper memoranda - and also supplanting a significant proportion of telephone calls. The service is also used extensively from home by a number of senior executives.
Abstract: An organization with a larger number of engineers has introduced office automation to increase productivity. A committmentto using the system 100% with the service company has resulted in several distinct benefits; such as faster communication and decision-making, speedier turnroundfor proposals to customers and the ability to deal with mail away from base. The electronic mail facility has proved the mostpopular, with calendar and personal computing less well used, and the electronic noticeboard hardly used at all. Problems included lack of time to learn the system. Keywords: data processing, office automation, electronic mail. Barry Sheffield is director of management services for the Plessey group.
18
0011-684W85/020018-03$03.00
0
Office Plus is an internal bureau service which runs on two dedicated DEC Vax computers in the Plessey Computer Centre at Addlestone in Surrey and can be accessed from all Plessey sites in the UK through the Plessey private wideband network and from overseas locations via dialup. The service is based on DEC AllIn-One software (with a number of important modifications to meet Plessey requirements) which provides a store-and-forward mailbox facility together with a comprehensive personal filing and information retrieval system and shared word processing facilities. The two Vax machines are linked to the corporate telex store-and-forward computer at Ilford to provide all Office Plus users with an on-the-deck telex facility. Users may also access a wide range of personal computing facilities and applications programs. As well as providing tools for textual communication and information storage, the system provides access to information extracted from a variety of external information sources and disseminated company-wide via a videotex service. One of the major aims of Office Plus was to accommodate a wide choice of workstations to enable users to choose the workstation most appropriate to their own needs. The system is currently being accessed using personal computers, word processors and other terminals made by Plessey Office Systems, DEC, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Wang, ACT, BBC, Apple,
1985 Butterworth
& Co (Publishers)
Ltd.
Prime, Tandy.
AES,
Lexitron,
Epson
and
The Plessey group Plessey is a group of high-tech electronics companies with a total turnover in excess of &l OOOM. The group employs approximately 40 000 people and is subdivided into about 20 autonomous businesses, each of which has the responsibility for selecting its own computer systems (albeit under the watchful eye of a corporate management services function). There are five major computer suppliers to the group: DEC, Hewlett Packard, ICL, Microdata and Sperry.
Plessey Management Services Ltd (PMSL) PMSL is a Plessey subsidiary with a turnover of around &12M and a staff of 300. It sells its services to other members of the group and to some extent externally to non-Plessey customers. It operates a large mainframe bureau with a turnover of &5M and is responsible for the Plessey private telecommunications network which links all Plessey sites. It also incorporates a software house with 90 staff and a printing and publicity services organization.
Justification for office automation The original justification for setting up an office automation service was that Plessey employs some 11000 professionals (mainly engineers) who do not have their own secretaries and typically are able to spend no more than 40% of their time on creative work. The remainder of their time tends to be taken up with meetings, report writing, telephone calls, travel and other forms of administrative activity. It was argued that by providing electronic secretarial facilities it would be possible to improve their productivity. If their productivity could be increased from 40% to 50% it was estimated that an improvement of
data processing
off ice automation &25M a year in profit would be possible. A further reason for setting up a corporate office automation service was to preempt the uncontrolled growth of incompatible electronic mail systems which would have been inevitable if office automation had been left to individual initiatives within the separate business units. The DEC software product All-InOne was chosen as the basis for the system, mainly because it is a world leader in the sphere of office automation, providing comprehensive and easy-to-use facilities for an office worker. It can also readily be tailored to specific needs and it provides relatively easy interfaces for non-DEC workstations. A further factor in the choice of AllIn-One was that it is Vax-based. This is a matter of some importance in an organization possessing some 50-60 Vax computers. It was also considered extremely important that DEC had clearly embarked on a major mainstream development programme aimed at maintaining its undoubted market leadership in the field of office automation.
PMSL as a guinea pig One of the first actions was to commit to using Office Plus 100% inside PMSL. Since mid-1983 all internal correspondence has been carried out bv electronic means. With the benefit oi 18 months’ correspondence avaiiable on disc files, the system now provides a very powerful reference medium. All managers have become used to looking at VDU screens instead of paper and everyone has worked out their own ‘way of operating in this new enviroxlment.
Office automation in practice Experience has shown that by far the most useful aspect of thle service is the electronic mail and filing facility, coupled where appropriate with word processing. The link to the telex
~0127no 2
march 1985
computer and the followup system have also proved to be extremely useful. The Corporate Information Service, based on videotex, is intended as an ‘electronic noticeboard’ for the use of anyone with information to display widely inside the group. However, its use has so far been disappointingly small. Calendar management and personal computing are also not enormously popular. The problem with calendar management is that the software available for maintaining personal diaries and scheduling meetings is not yet sophisticated enough to meet the needs of the busy executive. The ability to transmit text from any Office Plus workstation to any one of a variety of phototypesetters and laser printers has also not yet been fully exploited, but there are signs that this is an area where considerable progress is likely in the near future.
means that user guides and even help screens are of little value. Accordingly, considerable effort has been put into making Office Plus as selfexplanatory as possible and providing an effective support service. New users frequently express concern about the privacy of information stored in the system. However, when the sophisticated security precautions exercised at the computer centre and the elaborate protection provided by the software controlling the whole system are explained, most users realise that the security is many times better than that of the somewhat crude but accepted method of typing information on paper, putting it in an envelope and passing it through many pairs of hands to a recipient who subsequently stores it in a flimsy metal filing cabinet. Another unexpected deterrent has proved to be the problem of poor spelling. Fortunately, the spelling check facility built into the system rapidly dispels this concern.
Problems encountered Keyboard shyness has proved in practice to be less of a problem than expected. Most people seem more than willing to indulge in two-finger typing for short or urgent messages because of the considerable benefit of instant communication. Related to this is the problem of the procedures used by a manager and his secretary. Generally speaking, experience shows that if the manager is equipped with a dumb terminal and the secretary with a word processor, the manager will normally need to use the keyboard only for urgent or short messages. Lengthy text is dictated for the secretary to enter, ready for final checking and editing on the manager’s own terminal. Possibiy the most difficult problem encountered in practice has been the fact that a busy executive finds it difficult to spare enough time to learn the system, easy though it is. This places ease of use at a premium and
Lessons learned In expanding the use of office automation throughout the group it was decided at the outset that the surest and fastest way would be to sell the system first to top management. This seems to be proving effective as, having introduced Office Plus to most of the main board executive directors, it is now rapidly spreading throughout the company hierarchy. An interesting phenomenon is that frequently executives see a demonstration of Office Plus and then ask to have their secretaries connected to it, but not to have a terminal themselves. Experience shows that if this is too easily allowed the system tends to be used simply as a form of high-speed telex, which of course results in the full benefits not being achieved. It is very important that executives should have terminals on their own desks, even though the bulk of their input is via dictation to a secretary.
19
It is also found that the benefits are more easily gained if new users concentrate initially on electronic mail, leaving word processing and personal computing until they have become proficient in using mail. However, many professionals already use personal computing extensively and in such cases all that is necessary is to connect their own machine to the network. The problem mentioned earlier of users being unable to spare the time to learn how to use the system properly highlights the problem of training and support. Obviously the real answer is to provide a system which is so selfexplanatory and so foolproof that instruction is unnecessary, but as no office automation system is available today anywhere near which approaches this ideal, there is a need for good inhouse training courses. This is especially necessary for secretaries. Generally speaking, a welltrained secretary can help managers to learn how to use the system on a gradual basis. Nevertheless, for senior executives it is still necessary to provide an intermittent one-for-one handholding service and a surprisingly large number of support staff have proved to be needed for this. Perhaps the most important lesson of all is the need for a willingness to become totally dependent on office automation as the basic means of business communization. No user should ever normally find it necessary to write a letter on paper to another person who is a user of the system. Nor should it be necessary ever to file documents on paper if they have been either sent or received electronically. Frequently, new users are willing to use Office Plus for informal messages but still insist on sending important correspondence in the traditional way. Obviously this, to a very large extent, is defeating the whole objective of office automation and a major training objective is to overcome this problem.
20
Benefits The original justification for Office Plus was its potential for improving office productivity. However, experience in Plessey shows that the benefits which can be gained in terms of improving managerial effectiveness through faster co~unication may well be even greater than the financial benefits obtainable from improved office productivity. The instant communication which Office Plus provides, accelerates the speed of decision-making dramatically and the impact of this in terms of operating a business in highly competitive markets is very significant. The speed with which it is possible to pass documents between locations anywhere in the organization has the very practical effect of enabling customer proposals and other documents to be redrafted rapidly and, if necessary, published in a matter of hours rather than weeks using manual methods. Again this is of considerable importance when competing in highly competitive world markets. The availability of the system on all Plessey sites through the corporate network means that an executive can deal with correspondence promptly even when away from base. This is another facility which contributes significantly to efficient business operations. The combined effect of these factors can be a very worthwhile improvement in business competitiveness . Future developments Office Plus currently runs on two dedicated Vax computers at Addlestone, but it is intended to extend it onto local Vax computers in a number of Plessey locations, networking them together so that compatible facilities and a consistent user index are available to all. A forthcoming version of Office Plus will include integrated voice messages. This means that voice mes-
sages will be handled in exactly the same way as text messages, with a single filing and retrieval mechanism covering both. This level of integration will eventually also apply to composite including documents image as well as text and voice. Document scanning and optical character recognition, already a practical proposition, will have a useful part to play as a means of entering documents received from external sources. Initially as a separate venture, but with an eye to ultimate integration with Office Plus, videoconference facilities are being planned for linking Plessep sites. To achieve this the latest developments in bandwidth compression will be employed. Considerable development work is being done on enhancing the document transfer facilities, with the aim of providing good word processing compatibility across a wide range of personal computers and word processors . Other goals include the integration of facsimile and the use of artificial intelligence to make the system capable of learning how to communicate more effectively with individual people. The advent of cellular radio has exciting prospects in relation to office automation as it will make it possible to be permanently in touch with business affairs through the medium of a telephone carried in the car (and eventually in the pocket) and also capable of transmitting and receiving electronic mail. Overall, these developments are leading rapidly towards a new and exciting era when office automation will be the normal medium for all Plessey business comm~ication. Management Services Limited executives who are habitual users of Office Plus find it difficult to imagine how it was possible to operate effectively 0 without it. The Plessey Company pie, Vicarage Lane, flford, Essex fG1 4AQ, UK.
data processing