What's impressive is how much office work, from my experience, could easily be automated away. Not even with anything fancy - very simple scripts would be enough for a lot of stuff.
It's not uncommon to find people in offices doing things like manually generating the stock reports and graphs each year, collating dozens of Excel spreadsheets by hand, or even doing data cleaning by hand. For all the excitement in the news about machine learning and robots, a huge chunk of work could be automated away with relatively simple tools.
I hear this often, but have yet to see it in practice. I have worked in government and a number of underfunded non-profits who would dearly love to have some of these things automated. But in my experience it just shifts work. It automates something, requiring extra work somewhere else. Or it automates, but then breaks one, mission critical function that needs to be taken care of. I truly don't think this is just about "save my job", because they feel the pinch of lack of personal and funding, but about the difficulty in truly enumerating what the workflow actually is. Once you've paid a consultant to take care of it, you realize you forgot 3 steps in the process or that they were not listening when you described them.
I think a lot of people would be happy to implement this if they had the opportunity. In one office job I had a while back, I let my superiors know that I could write scripts to automate repetitive tasks, and they were more than happy to help me work with people to automate a lot of the processes.
I'm talking about very simple operations. For instance, 100 different clients send in information in individual Excel spreadsheets, and the company wants to have a master file with all the info. So they literally have someone open one document, copy all the info on page 1 and paste it to a master file, then copy all the information from page 2 and paste it to the master file, etc. For each page and each file. This is something that's simple to automate, and less prone to error than copy and pasting hundreds of sections by hand. And once a script is made to automate it, it's a simple thing to run it each year.
It's not even that organizations don't want to or try to automate stuff like this - check out how some of them multi-nested Excel formula then end up using in an effort to have some kind of automation. They just aren't familiar with much beyond Excel formula's (or perhaps some clunky proprietary software they struggle with).
Like I said, in my experience organizations are happy to use automation if you can show them what it can do, but they often simply aren't aware of how much it can accomplish. And you need someone comfortable enough to run the script and make basic changes to it, and if that person leaves they're probably back to doing things by hand.
It would be nice if people were taught at least enough about programming that they were able to write scripts to automate simple repetitive tasks.
It's not uncommon to find people in offices doing things like manually generating the stock reports and graphs each year, collating dozens of Excel spreadsheets by hand, or even doing data cleaning by hand. For all the excitement in the news about machine learning and robots, a huge chunk of work could be automated away with relatively simple tools.