We’ve come a long way from the days of having interns spend summers locked away in file rooms with boxes of papers to sort through, or needing to replace typewriter ribbon to finish up that company memo to hand out. Those working in IT at any company feel the unique pressures from their industry to stay current, or even ahead, of technology. Those in credit union IT aren’t any different.

A recent piece on CUTimes.com discusses some options for automation that can accommodate the mix of physical, virtual and cloud resources that define most enterprise tasks to help credit union IT departments “become more agile.” As the author states, “Financial IT people aren’t imagining things: Their jobs are definitely getting tougher. While computing resources are becoming less expensive and more plentiful, staffing levels, for the most part, are remaining constant. This resource gap is putting stress on IT organizations because the professionals in those departments must deal with increasingly complex systems that don’t interact well with each other.”

So with that being said, the four suggestions for workload automation are as follows:

1. Reporting.  Intelligent workload automation can streamline and consolidate reporting, using parameters in pre-built job steps instead of through hard coding. Stock notifications, for example, can be reported according to virtually any pricing parameter, along with custom alerts as needed. By setting calls for data, triggers for specific reports, scheduling according to business rules, distributions based on dependencies and so on, report management can be minimized dramatically.

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