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Good article. I would like to reiterate “…proper automation requires a thorough knowledge of performing the activity manually.”
It has been my experience that management and operational staff often rely on, and come to expect that, a program or utility will always spit out the final result with minimal to no input or thought on the part of the user. The concept of testing results is viewed as an inconvenience and often ignored. It would be a good practice to audit our systems regularly to ensure that what we have implemented in the form of automated processes continues to produce the expected results for which it was originally designed. Inherently however, automation is the cause of our complacency and idleness.
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This article touches on the very basic principles of learning – the first step is to see how a concept works visually and be able to understand the concept before applying it. I’m old enough to have learned accounting by using T-accounts to illustrate how a debit and a credit should behave, does this even happen anymore in schools? The second step is to repeat the activity over and over until nuances and anomolies are identified and dealt with. This can occur in a short time frame or over the course of a lifetime. The third step is to TEST TEST TEST to see if all you’ve learned can be applied to solve real problems. I agree with Drew – automation is a benefit and an excellent method of getting more work done (leverage) but cannot be a replacement for sanity checks, audits, oversight and remediation of incorrect assumptions.
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