In fact, the latest Business Trends Report by BDO finds that despite the UKs plan to keep hiring more staff, the country is failing to raise productivity. Recent Office for National Statistics figures show that productivity has not increased since 2007, there are a few reasons why.
Part of the challenge lies in the ever-increasing number of business connections in the new digital workplace, in combination with having to manage the rapid growth in information from multiple electronic devices.
Ultimately, productivity determines prosperity, but with the growing demands on managing your content, how can you prioritise productivity into your enterprise
1. Acknowledge the situation: Apps, devices, cloud, mobile all of the new trends in technology only add fuel to the information fire. Meanwhile, the mandate for organisations to manage the influx of information is just around the corner.
Take a step back and map how the IT transformation is changing your work and your workforce. Use this map to then move onto the next step
2. Try to understand the information: What trends are occurring in your business Is there a particular source that needs access to information within your organisations firewall Do your mobile workers require the ability to check specific contact information or documents
Understanding the types of content you have, who uses it and what materials need to be accessed from outside the firewall perimeter will help you research the appropriate tools to organise and streamline the data deluge.
3. Be flexible: Research firm IDC indicates that digital content will grow by 50 times from 2010 to 2020. Finding the answers in how to contain and manage this information will be a step-by-step process.
Determine which tools and IT systems will offer best ease of management along with deployment flexibility and remember that the easier a solution is to use, the faster it will be adopted.
4. Be open source, that is: Information and business processes need to live both inside and outside of your firewall. Part of the transformation into digital enterprise requires the tools to control access and safeguard information with permissions and restrictions to determine what users can read and edit.
Using an open approach gives you the ability to integrate with local and non-local systems, and ensures information is being shared (and kept) in the right place.
5. Keep it simple: Companies are over burdened by information fat and this slows them down. AIIM notes 15bn is wasted looking for lost documents at work. This shouldnt be the case given the number of technological tools at business leaders disposal that can be implemented to skim the fat.
Now is the time to look for systems that are simple to use and have the ability to make your company more information-agile.
Read more on productivity:
- How interior design can help business owners boost productivity in the office
- Why customer engagement will replace productivity as the primary driver of growth
- The 7 office distractions causing British businesses to lose 250m annually
In taking steps to prioritise our productivity well start to benefit from the age of the digital enterprise. By integrating information, processes, work and people, organisations are able to collaborate more efficiently and effectively, something that will only further increase productivity and in turn enable organisations to produce more valuable products and services.
Ultimately, by addressing our productivity downfalls, organisations will revolutionise the way they do business.
John Newton, CTO, founder and chairman of Alfresco, has had one of the longest and most influential careers in content management. In 1990, John co-founded, designed and led the development of Documentum, the leader in content management acquired by EMC.
For the next ten years, he invented many of the concepts widely used in the industry today. In addition, he built Documentum’s marketing and professional services organisations in Europe. John has also been an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Benchmark Capital and was one of the founding engineers at Ingres where he helped develop the world’s first commercial relational database.
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