The machine learning solution to the UK's productivity problem

Speeding up poorly performing applications is one way of addressing the UK's productivity woes, argues Paul Scarrott

Labelled the "the economic challenge of our age", Britain's productivity gap continues to grow. Indeed, the latest labour productivity figures show how the divide between the UK and the remaining members of the G7 group of industrial nations is currently at its greatest since modern records began in the early 1990s.

And with the unemployment rate falling to 5.2 per cent - its lowest in nearly a decade - improving British productivity is no longer a question of getting people into jobs, but how to help them drive greater output from every hour worked. This poses a significant challenge to both businesses and policymakers.

Last year the government announced a mix of deregulation and government intervention to rectify the poor productivity performance: ranging from skills, apprenticeships and universities, to transport and finance.

However, one potential productivity game-changer was overlooked: increasing the productivity of IT systems.

The price of poor IT infrastructure

Poorly performing IT and a lack of access to data are increasingly cited by professional workers as frustrating their ability to achieve their full potential. Indeed, new research, commissioned by Nimble Storage found that nearly one-third of Brits report that the speed of the applications they use at work significantly impacts their performance.

Yet, the impact that IT infrastructure can have on productivity is rarely given the attention it deserves, with delays discredited as mere seconds or a necessary evil.

But this time quickly adds up. In fact, the research found that on average employees experience four software caused delays per work day, each lasting roughly 7 seconds.

When taking into account the average hourly wage in the UK, the total cost of these delays to the British economy amounts to £744,235,520 per year.

The staggering app economy

Organisations of all shapes and sizes are modernising and transforming to expand their capabilities and pursue digital projects. As such, applications are playing an increasingly essential role in most professional occupations. Typically companies rely on hundreds - and sometimes thousands - of applications to power every business process, from product development, to sales and marketing.

Many of these new digital projects and processes require uninterrupted, rapid access to data. When the delivery of data to an application is disrupted, a gap is created which not only negatively impacts the user experience, but ultimately affects the business outcome and the organisation's effectiveness.

To help drive greater output from their workers, it's important that organisations consider how to overcome this app-data gap. Ninety-four per cent of UK IT staff report that they experience delays when inputting and accessing information on business software applications at work. Another 42 per cent indicated that they typically waste between 10-30 minutes a day on application response delays.

Debunking the storage myth

While IT and network administrators frequently regard the app-data gap purely as a storage issue, in more than half of the cases examined the application breakdowns derived from non-storage related complex infrastructures. This created an app-data gap which disrupted the delivery of data - ultimately meaning the information was not rapidly available, slowing the process.

For that reason, it's important that organisations take a holistic approach to reducing disruption to data delivery. Organisations must predict and prevent any barriers to data movement across their entire infrastructure. And in what can sometimes feel like an unending infrastructure stack, using predictive analytics is the only sure-fire way, other than an army of IT experts, to keep the infrastructure running perfectly.

Indeed, by incorporating flash-optimised architectures and predictive analytics, organisations will be better positioned to anticipate and rapidly remediate complex issues, simplify planning and avoid hot spots. In the long term, it will also enable IT and network admins to make predictions regarding future storage performance and capacity, enabling them to plan for improvements to be made seamlessly and with the least disruption.

Improving productivity is essential to both individual businesses and to the wider economy. And while it is clear that many of the skills-based and cultural measures can help organisations drive greater output, policy makers and businesses alike are currently overlooking an important, practical step that will immediately improve their workers' productivity.

As one of the greatest challenges to the British economy, businesses must explore practical avenues that will help them increase their workers' output. And when it can be achieved while concurrently reducing worker frustration, companies must consider how reducing the app-data gap will enable them to increase both their workers' productivity and the success of their digital processes.

Paul Scarrott is a director at Nimble Storage