Welcome to the world of automation. This is also how many underdogs manage to grab a slice from the "big players". You'd be surprised how many large companies that could easily afford to optimize their processes just don't do it.

You find dedicated people (or even departments) doing nothing but strictly repetitive tasks. Things like filing invoices, keeping a stock of parts according to a set of rules or even, like you said, aggregating always the same information and mailing it in always the same format to the execs.

In every company that I have worked so far there were quite a few people who could have literally been replaced by the proverbial shell-script.

Doing so (when appropiate) always gives you an edge because you'll be faster and less prone to errors in that area than the meatbag-driven competitor - plus you free up ressources for more interesting tasks.

I've seen this / experienced this myself. It may sound cynical, but it is so, so true.

Addendum: On the other hand, many of the people in those roles were quite nice and willing to help, if you treated them like a human being. If you made your case well, layers of bureaucracy could sometimes "jump" right out of the way. Not always, but sometimes. Often, there was another layer of interaction unofficially built in. Something to be aware of, when you automate. There may be more going on than you realize, some of it offering real business value, perhaps even making the overall workflow practical where it would otherwise flounder and die.

Nothing, I guess, that hasn't been said before. I hate to see people labeled "redundant". Often enough, they've been the ones effectively working around a broken formal process, as best they could given the constraints applied.

In the same direction:

  -wrote a script to download daily sales data from iTunes and upload to google docs for charting
  -use http://www.moopf.com/appstorereviews/ to keep track of my reviews on iTunes
  -automated IIS6 deployment from empty machine
  -wrote an admin panel for the web site users
  -outsorced hosting 
    (I was tinking about buying a server to host my ASP.NET app at first).

I think this is all basic stuff. Interested to find what others have.

Does your language of choice have a Google Chart integration? Rails has a couple options, and I have never found anything that gets "quick and dirty chart" done as fast or easily. I currently use it for most of my dashboard charts. While it has some annoying limitations it frees you from server-side dependencies on image modification libraries and the resulting charts (static images) can be accessed from a cell phone. (Some of the Javascript and Flash solutions I've used don't handle that so well.)

This lets you ignore the whole annoying step of logging into Google Docs to review the data -- just spit the URL for the chart directly into an image tag on your panel, problem solved. It also greatly simplifies any sort of "manipulate Google Docs' interface" step you might have, since you can just write arbitrary parsing code in your language of choice and then spit the numbers into the chart.

For additional sexy you can add any lightbox script you want and then have, essentially, a Javascript zoom button for any of them in about 4 marginal lines of code.

Not for RoR, but for PHP I've had great success with http://pchart.sourceforge.net/

Check out one of my quick and dirty graphs: http://yowzas.com/charts/view/0316017922.gif

There is also an iPhone application called "Sales Report" that will download your daily sales data and give you a report with graphs & etc right on your iPhone.

When comparing technology vendors in a mature area I think it's good to pick a new, smart entrant who's somewhat proven but still hungry. They are the ones who get customers by competing on quality and features. Don't always go with the default or the sexy choice.

"somewhat proven" is key. Don't shoot yourself by piloting something experimental without the ability to fix it yourself or replace it in a hurry.

Know the technology well. Build the quick+dirty version yourself, then shop around for mature software that does what you now know you need.

Every morning I wake up and read all the latest Chicago news, looking for stuff to submit to my social news site or pass along to other users to check out.

This was taking a long time and wasn't very fun.

So I created my own private alltop/tinyURLs for every mainstream media RSS feed, local blog and the search results for "Chicago" for all the big social media sites.

It's saved me great big gads of time. At some point I will possibly open this up to others.

Patrick, you've also mentioned this dashboard on JBoS. I would be interested in licensing the script(s) from you. Contact info in my profile.

Read non-important news once a week.

Check your e-mail when you're not working..not all day.