Named for the man who wanted machines to do the clerk-work.
In 1821 Charles Babbage was checking printed tables of figures by hand and kept finding errors. He is said to have wished they had been calculated by steam, and he spent the rest of his life designing machines that could.
His Analytical Engine of 1837 took its instructions on punched cards borrowed from weaving looms. It was the first design for a general-purpose computer, a century before one was built. In 1843 Ada Lovelace wrote what is regarded as the first program for it.
Babbage believed that tedious, error-prone work belonged to machines. Nearly two centuries later the machines exist, yet most firms are still full of that work.
"The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform."Notes on the Analytical Engine
Where the market is going.
Routine work moves to software
Copying, chasing, checking and filing will run in the background, as unremarkable as electricity.
Smaller firms gain what larger firms had
Automation once needed an internal technology team. The local firm will have the same tools as the national one.
Value shifts to judgement
Advice and relationships will matter more; hours of processing will matter less.
Early movers compound
Each process automated makes the next one quicker, so the gap widens every year.