Organizations often believe the latest and greatest technology solutions are the key to boosting productivity. Yet the big gap many fail to acknowledge is that what they are truly looking at is revamping their own processes to best leverage technology and reduce inefficiencies.
It’s this disparity that could explain the recent flattening in productivity reported in an article by David Coleman on the CMSWire website. American productivity growth has been slow for years and productivity actually decreased in the last quarter of 2012, despite all the technological advances of the past decade.
Companies often correlate the installation of technology with productivity and ROI. Our experts frequently see a push-pull between upper-level management and knowledge workers. While management pushes to improve productivity by leveraging technology, workers often don’t feel empowered to make decisions to change processes or governance as these relate to how they work and ensure compliance.
For example, consider the process of e-commerce and corporate America accepting digital signatures. The process of becoming comfortable with completing monetary transactions online represented a large change in management operation. It has made a tremendous impact on productivity and the way companies are able to reach out to customers and do business.
By the same token, implementing social enterprise or new collaboration solutions won’t necessarily improve productivity. Issues include the confusion between consumer and enterprise social tools, as well as incomplete integration. A study highlighted in the CMSWire article found that 60 percent of managers are now aware of social tools and their benefits. That’s up from 10 percent in 2009, but the article’s author doubts they truly understand what they’re getting into.
When it comes to collaboration and changing processes internally, people are wedded to the processes they know and the approval chains they’re bound by. When you begin to redesign processes to leverage collaborative technology, there must be a level of acceptance for change in governance and how the approval chain is administered. Often, organizations believe they can simply take existing processes and mirror them with the same approval chains. The real question is how do you simplify these processes without sacrificing compliance? That’s the key to improving productivity.
We’re in the midst of developing social enterprise and identifying how collaboration and social improve productivity. This is the most recent step in an enterprise evolution that began in 1980s, when businesses began implementing processes where there had been none. In the 1990s, those processes were refined and cemented. In the mid-’90s, the Internet placed an emphasis on creating content for web pages. Then, by 2005, people had realized the Internet was good for connecting with others, not just access to content. That has led to the rise of consumer social media, which in turn led to social enterprise.
In the end, our experts believe the key is to pinpoint how this technology aligns with business models. It’s not just about being social. It’s about how technologies connect data, content, people, discussions and processes together. Social doesn’t necessarily mean Facebook and Twitter for the enterprise. To be successful, it must address specific business needs in the enterprise.
Source: CMSWire, August 2013
