IT PROCUREMENT
A closer look at the technologies facilitating efficiencies and cost optimisation at a time where it is more necessary than ever
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Efficiency is prized by every organisation . Long before agile methodologies such as Kanban became commonplace , humans have strived to eke out more from what they put in , whether that ’ s James Watt ’ s improvements to the steam engine or the innovation of the assembly line by Henry Ford and others before him .
In the modern age , emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence , the Internet of Things ( IoT ), and the cloud are at the bleeding edge of cost optimisation .
Take robotic process automation ( RPA ), for instance , a technology which blurs the line between the human and the purely automated by allowing robots to interact directly with the kinds of graphical user interfaces used by people . Robots may be trained by watching and recreating a human teacher ’ s inputs , and then improve themselves in terms of speed and reliability . The RPA market is duly in the ascendancy - according to Gartner , it grew by 63.1 % in 2018 ( the latest year for which figures were available ), reaching around US $ 846mn in revenue .
OCTOBER 2020