Productivity, mobility and donuts
“In an economy that is now more information based than industrial, and where companies are being forced to downsize due to the financial crisis, increasing the productivity of the information worker has become imperative. It has become obvious that tasks related to creating, organizing, finding, and analyzing information have become significant time sinks and IDC’s research demonstrates that investment in better information access, management,and collaboration tools and processes pays for itself, often in a matter of months. When knowledge work is automated, not only are enterprises more efficient but their relationships with customers, partners, and suppliers are improved immeasurably.”
Susan Feldman, IDC analyst and author of the report, Hidden Costs of Information Work: A Progress Report. http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=217936
Hey I'm making a run, want anything?
I’m an “information worker” myself so naturally talk of increasing my productivity by some type of investment piques my interest… I thought I was already at 100%.
“…increasing the productivity of the information worker”…how can this be done? Thankfully, there is some objective research that points towards an answer. Erik Brynjolfsson [i] at the Sloan School identifies seven specific practices that constitute the most effective use of IT: 1) Move from analog to digital processes, 2) Open information access, 3) Empower the employees, 4) Use merit-based incentives, 5) Invest in corporate culture, 6) Recruit the right people, 7) Invest in human capital.
I can see how some of these practices would be directly linked to a corporate investment in IT. Others however are really in the domain of management practices and strategy. According to Brynjolfsson, what is most powerful is technology investment combined with productivity-focused business practice:
“The productivity literature of the last decade points to a virtually unanimous conclusion – information technology directly or indirectly created the lion’s share of the resurgence of productivity in the United States since 1995. Previously, the picture was less clear. Before 1995, decades’ worth of investment in information technology seemed to yield virtually no measurable results to productivity growth (an effect commonly referred to as the productivity paradox). In 1995, however, productivity growth almost doubled from 1.4 percent per year to 2.5 percent per year. But IT by itself wasn’t the sole cause of the doubled growth. We find a significant body of research showing that technology played a larger role in the post-1995 acceleration of productivity in the United States than in other industrialized countries because American firms also adopted productivity-enhancing business practices along with their IT investments.”
To me, this all resonates with the concept of a “thoughtocracy” or a “democracy of ideas” as spelled out by Hamel & Breen in the The Future of Management. This is a management approach where ideas and knowledge prosper based on merit rather than top-down influence from those higher up the corporate food chain. In their words, “Try to imagine what a democracy of ideas would look like. Employees would feel free to share their thoughts and opinions, however politically charged they might be… New ideas would be given the chance to garner support before being voted up or down by senior execs.”
This implies that the establishment of a “democracy of ideas” is some mix of new practices and a communication media to support it. Looking at the web, we can see many example of the existence of this (here is one), but in corporate settings, it’s rare.
When I imagine a “democracy of ideas”, I think of the communication “backchannels” that now exist in many tech-centric organizations mediated by mobile chat and messaging applications on Blackberries, iPhones and the like. I’ve been to many meetings where there are parallel meetings happening in the same time & place: the primary meeting delivered over verbal and visual channels, and the backchannels, where mobile devices are being used for electronic communication and collaboration that may or may not be related to the primary discussion. Typically these backchannel discussions are short-lived and the ideas exchanged perhaps don’t have the half-life that I’d envision in a democracy of ideas, but I think this will change over time as people grow accustomed to these practices.
That brings me to the donuts. “Dunkin Run” – the use of a communication backchannel for the collaborative work of taking a donut break. See, things are changing already: democracy of donut runs today, democracy of ideas in the workplace not too far behind.
[i] Brynjolfsson, Erik Seven Pillars of Productivity, Optimize, May 2005. http://ebusiness.mit.edu/erik/Seven%20Pillars%20of%20Productivity.pdf
[ii] McNely, B. 2009. Backchannel Persistence and Collaborative Meaning-Making. In Proceedings of the Special Interest Group on the Design of Communication (Bloomington, IN, October 5-7, 2009). SIGDOC ’09. ACM Press, New York, NY, np.http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1621995.1622053