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
How mobility affects the “space and time” of existing telemedical practice
Nicolini [i] uses a helpful metaphor for telemedicine as a way to “stretch out” existing medical practices in space and time and change how and when clinical decisions are made. A live video teleconsultation then could be considered a “stretch” in space, removing the requirement that the caregiver and patient be collocated at the time of the consultation. “Store and forward” telemedicine is a stretch in time, enabling previously-collected health data to be assessed at a time convenient to the analyst.
In conventional wired-network telemedicine, the data may travel long distances but the endpoints are generally stationary and associated with a specific place. The addition of mobility technologies to telemedicine breaks this association–the endpoints are no longer fixed. Perhaps a modification of Nicolini’s metaphor is appropriate. Mobility can allow us to advantageously “compress” time in time-critical situations by removing latencies due to the need for collocation or for parties to be at fixed network endpoints. Mobility changes the temporal aspects of medical workflows; adding synchronous aspects to formerly asynchronous workflows.
One example of this may be observed in the technologies used for real time ambulatory cardiac surveillance. The most well-known device for this purpose is the Holter monitor, an ambulatory electrocardiographic (ECG) recording device that typically record 24-hours of ECG data to aid in the diagnosis of arrhythmias. However limitations in recording capacity and the delay between data collection and subsequent data review hampers the Holter monitor’s ability to detect infrequent cardiac events. This can be a diagnostic problem in situations where atrial fibrillation (AF) is suspected as a cause of cryptogenic stroke, because even 24-hours of recording time can miss AF episodes occurring at a rate of 1- 6%[ii].
Typcial Holter device, an example of store-and-forward telemedicine
Mobility has allowed cardiac surveillance systems to evolve beyond the Holter monitor By using cellular networks and automatic arrhythmia detection algorithms, modern cardiac surveillance systems can detect and immediately transmit abnormal ECG waveforms to a remote monitoring center, increasing the likelihood of detecting intermittent cardiac events (for example, Cardionet). This is an example of a beneficial “compression” of the time interval between the occurrence of a cardiac event and the notification of medical professionals that has been enabled by mobility.
Mobile technologies can also compress “space”—the physical distance preventing rapid movement of medical information between two endpoints. One example of this is Welch-Allyn’s SmartLink system, which transmits data from a multi-parameter patient monitor used by first responders in the prehospital setting to an on-call cardiologist over a cellular network. Systems such as these can help reduce the “door to dilation” time–the elapsed time between a patient’s arrival at the hospital door and the dilation of a blocked coronary artery by angioplasty. This use of mobility has in effect, compressed the “space” between the patient and the cardiologist who need to see the patient’s ECG data to begin the workflow for cardiac catheterization.
[i] D. Nicolini. Stretching out and expanding work practices in time and space: The case of telemedicine
Human Relations, June 1, 2007; 60(6): 889 – 920.
[ii] Bell C, Kapral M. Use of ambulatory electrocardiography for the detection of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation in patients with stroke: Canadian task force on preventive health care. Can J Neurol Sci 2000;27:25-31.