Banks and manufacturing industries are among the hungriest users of IT resources, with healthcare, retailers, defense industries and government in their wake. Information processing is an important part of US economy. Banks and healthcare industries depend on information processing within tight deadlines that owe themselves to Federal regulations. Modern economies have also to process information because, despite banishing the paper trails, they still generate a lot of paper documents that need processing and archiving. Transcriptionists have to transcribe medical records.
Court reporters have to make verbatim reporting.
Documents are processed as part of imaging workflow. Banks have been the bleeding edge of this kind of automation. Banks have indeed downsized, largely due to automation, even though all banks and financial institutions taken together have seen their total employment in US grow during the 1990s. Of these, keyers and call center workers are the largest categories. More recently, the category of computer engineers, network technicians, and professional computer specialists have had stellar growth in the numbers of jobs, and forecasts for these categories are equally bullish.