Almost all technology starts life as a productivity tool – a way of improving the ratio of outputs to inputs.
Word processors, for example, speeded up the job of typing documents, while spreadsheets automated the laborious task of totting up columns of figures.
Yet we are all aware of the paradox of a time-saving technology that ends up making us less efficient – some would argue that email, for example, became counter-productive through misuse.
Any productivity tool, therefore, has to be assessed on its ability to deliver results.
‘Look at the critical success factor delivering programmes. How will you know that it has been successful?’ says Steve Rist, head of the technology practice at consultant PIPC.
‘What will you be able to do that you could not do before? What will you be able to sell that you could not sell before? And how much cost will you have taken out of the business?’
Productivity is more difficult to measure for white-collar workers than for manual workers. But there are pointers.
All office workers are engaged in finding information, using it and sharing it, so modern productivity tools are focused on making those jobs easier. Programming tools that allow developers to reuse code, or online discussion forums that enable employees to share expertise, are a way of avoiding unnecessary duplication.
The three areas of finding, using and sharing information are served by several types of productivity tool: search engines, workflow software, content management systems, business intelligence systems and collaboration software.
Increasingly the lines between these systems are becoming blurred. Google’s Search Appliance can hunt business intelligence applications, for example, while the next version of Sharepoint, Microsoft’s collaboration software, will include an enterprise search tool and an index of employees’ expertise.
Modern businesses have to deal with the problem of the sheer volume of information – researcher IDC estimates that 35 to 50 per cent of company information is not centrally indexed and searchable.
Andrew Stevenson, head of centres of excellence for systems integration at consultant Atos Origin, says there are many silos of information within a business.
‘That information is in many different forms and formats,’ he says. ‘So not only do you have silos of business intelligence style information, but you have silos of documentation and silos of emails.’
Many businesses are now turning to content management and document management vendors such as EMC Documentum, Xerox, Tibco, Hummingbird and Vignette, to manage that information more effectively.
Some of these include workflow management functionality – a technology that Ian Charlesworth, senior analyst at Ovum, believes brings some of the most impressive productivity gains because it automates formerly manual processes.
‘If you have the ability to make sure that people’s work can be effectively routed and their tasks and workload can be managed electronically, you’re talking huge productivity gains,’ he says.
Organisations are also investing in more powerful search engines to help internal and external users find the right piece of information in the morass of Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and PDF files.
Isle of Wight Council found that users of both its internal intranet and external web site were spending far too long searching for information.
The council implemented a Google mini – a piece of combined hardware and software that can search 100,000 documents in 200 different file formats. And the result has been an increase in the number of searches (from about 2,000 a month to 10,000 a month), faster searches and reduced requests for support, says Gavin Muncaster, web team leader at the Isle of Wight council.
‘We used to get a lot of stuff coming to the web team just asking for documents. That has virtually dropped to nothing because people can find it for themselves,’ he says.
The move towards software that enables more effective collaboration has been driven, in part, by an increasingly dispersed workplace. A combination of factors – legislation on flexible working, the rise in global mergers and acquisitions, and technology itself – has resulted in large numbers of employees working either from home or on the road.
Neil Laver, head of sales and marketing at Microsoft’s Unified Communications Group, says more people are now working more remotely, hence the growth in real-time collaboration software.
‘Presence is core to all this – I can see who in my team is available,’ says Laver. ‘Some have a status which is “in a meeting”, so I know not to disturb them by IM or phoning; others are just available online, others are away so there is no point in ringing them because they’re not at their desk.’
Robert Mahowald, programme director of collaborative computing at IDC, has also seen that the productivity systems increasingly adopted by businesses are those that enable either real-time collaboration (web conferencing, video conferencing and instant messaging) or asynchronous collaboration (shared workspaces).
The amount of time saved by web conferencing as a substitute for travel is undeniable, he says.
‘What is the earn-back time for web conferencing? The biggest factor is not having to get on a plane,’ he says.
‘For a company of 500, the earn-back time is two weeks. When you start throwing in things such as lost opportunity time, and better and more efficient meetings, it’s amazing,’ says Mahowald.
Mobile workers can lose time simply through trying to connect to the office.
The Audit Bureau of Circulation (ABC) has just under 100 mobile workers who travel around the UK and Ireland.
‘One of their key bugbears was: to see a simple email meant they had to carry a laptop and a dial-up card, have connectivity to the office, and they had to fire up some software,’ says Phil McLeod, head of IT at ABC. ‘The whole process – just to see if someone had sent them an email – used to take 10 to 15 minutes.’
ABC adopted Sony P900 smartphones with OpenHand mobile email technology, and productivity savings were achieved within two months.
‘Instead of sending someone out with a laptop and dial-up card and taking 15 minutes trying to get their emails, we spend one or two minutes a day checking our emails and dealing with them appropriately,’ says McLeod.
The emails are not stored on the device, but on the network, and the data is compressed, so time spent on the transfer of information is minimal.
As organisations become more dependent on technology, the burden on that technology increases, which is why productivity tools are necessary to improve the efficiency of technology itself.
Motability, the car scheme for disabled people, has 5,000 dealers linked to its internal systems, as well as half a million customers. Its SAP application, however, was taking four hours to back up each night and eight hours to restore – and this affected application availability, which in turn hindered the organisation‘s ability to serve its customers.
Motability adopted Quest’s LiteSpeed for SQL Server software, which production database administrator Teshome Asfaw says reduced the backup time from four hours to one hour, and the restore time from eight hours to three hours. Motability believes that LiteSpeed paid for itself within one week.
All these technologies are about speed, whether carrying out a single task more quickly, cutting out time-wasting activities or automating previously manual processes. The trick in implementing them is to stay focused on the end result: identifying the areas where productivity is lost, and deciding what needs to be achieved to get you there.
Producing the goods
Capturing the impact of IT
reader comments