Employee monitoring business is not a new idea but the monitoring software as we know it today is a relatively young invention. However, regardless of this fact and within this short amount of time, employee monitoring software market has seen an exponential growth.

This little piece of computer program is more and more likely to be ever-present in the modern workplace and shape the business world to fit a new mold of cyber monitoring.

When will this happen? And what can we expect from online PC monitoring software in the future - new features, new applications of the existing ones, more precision and automation? Or all of the above?

Before we take a look at the future of PC utilization software, let’s take a quick look back and see how we got here.

A Brief History of Employee Monitoring Software

The idea and the need for some form of programs to monitor computer activity was probably as old as the widespread use of computers in the workplace. As soon as work got transferred from piles of papers on employees’ desks to the hard drive on their computers and, even more significantly perhaps, to online repositories, the question of how to monitor office computers began getting asked more and more often.

Then there were other social changes that added fuel to the fire. With phenomena like economic growth and the emergence of huge international enterprises, rapid technological advances and the rise of the popularity of remote work, finding the way of how to monitor computer user activity became almost a default concern for any business.

Will this result in the further spread of employer computer monitoring?

The Rising Popularity of Employee Monitoring Services

As we’ve mentioned earlier, more and more companies are realizing the need to monitor workers’ computer activities. Now, according to a recent Gartner research, more than half of all the companies are using some method of employee monitoring, which is an increase from just 30% of companies in the year 2015. The trend is obvious and its upwards trajectory is steep.

The same research predicted this number to reach as much as 80% of companies by next year.

Employee computer monitoring will definitely constitute a huge fraction of this number simply because the increasing number of business processes are being conducted in the digital realm. Besides, these systems are getting more powerful, so, for example, some of their features like an app for employees to clock in and out have the potential to take over some other types of employee monitoring, such as, in this particular case, keycards.

New Features and New Applications

Such a high demand for usage monitoring software has also created an extremely competitive market. As a result of this competition, new features of office monitoring software are constantly being added and improved upon.

Today, we have advanced technology like computer keystroke tracking software, employee screen capture software and even automated time trackers. The last one, for instance, can automatically assign employees’ time on different tasks to specific projects based only on the names of the files they’re working on.

The future can only hold more of such automatic, precise and useful functionalities.

As for the practical use and application of surveillance software for PC, it’s very likely going to surpass the limits of simple time tracking and activity monitoring program. One of the possible emerging technologies it can apply to is robotic process automation (RPA) which is essentially a way to teach a computer program to perform some types of repetitive and time-consuming digital tasks, which will allow employees to focus on innovation, creativity and customer relations. Screen watching software can provide the basis for the RPA learning process by mapping out all the specific steps that employees do in order to accomplish a task.

This is just one potential use case. There surely are many others. And with the staggering pace of technological development in general, there are bound to be more and more in the future.

Conclusion

The field of employee monitoring is developing rapidly in order to respond to the pace of the increase in demand. It’s expected to be even more popular and, with the new advanced and automatic features, the opportunities for its application are also expected to become more varied. Companies are starting to realize this potential and it’s becoming crystal clear that desktop monitoring software is here to stay.

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