Are Mobile Devices Taking the Place of a Personal Assistant?

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VENTURES AFRICA – Prospects, a UK official graduate career website defines a personal assistant as someone, who is sometimes called an executive secretary or personal/private secretary, someone who works closely with senior managerial or directorial staff to provide administrative support, usually on a one-to-one basis. PAs help managers to make the best use of their time by dealing with secretarial and administrative tasks.

Mobile devices on the other hand are portable computing devices such as a smart phones or tablet computers. The term “smart phone” first appeared in 1997, when Ericsson described its GS 88 “Penelope” concept as a Smart Phone. Early smart phones typically combined the features of a mobile phone with those of another popular consumer device, such as a personal digital assistant (PDA), a media player, a digital camera, or a GPS navigation unit. Modern smart phones include all of those features plus the features of a touch screen computer, including web browsing, Wi-Fi, and 3rd-party apps.
Typical PA jobs include organizing and maintaining diaries, making appointments, taking dictation and minutes, dealing with incoming email, faxes and post, often corresponding on behalf of the manager, to mention but a few.
Since the advent of smart devices, jobs such as making, fixing appointments, scheduling meetings and keeping record of what has and should be done have been left in the hands of certain applications installed on different smart devices. Some of these applications include the Google calendar, aCalendar, Business calendar, Digical, and Evercalendar.
The iphone, a product of apple, has an application that transcribes words out as you speak. This application comes in handy when you need to take notes during a meeting or when you are too busy to pick up a pen and a paper to take down a note.
Having a personal assistant means payment of salary or wage depending on the terms of agreement. Personal assistants also require occasional breaks or holidays and some of the time, do not work round the clock.
Smart devices do not require payments of any sort, are available always as long as they are powered up. Interestingly and most importantly, smart devices are very handy devices and can be carried around wherever and whenever.
This begs the question: Who needs a personal assistant when you have a smart device??