Auto-population: Who’s Doing It and Why?

You hate it! So does everyone else. Repeatedly you are asked by the Internal Revenue Service, your insurance company, your doctors—even your employer—to provide the same information over and over again. Much of the information they collect from you doesn’t change often, if at all. Your social security number, the names and birth dates of your spouse and children, your race, eye color, citizenship, previous surgeries, and the names of the drugs you are allergic to are all examples. And while these pieces of your personal and business data are likely to be the same from year to year, no one seems to care. They just keep asking you to provide the same information over and over again.

In Auto-population: Who’s Doing It and Why, Scott Abel explores what some organizations are doing to eradicate redundant data entry, reduce errors, speed time-to-market, eliminate wasteful and unnecessary expense, and increase content consistency by storing and automatically reusing information.