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Economist Ross Gittins on Technology and Productivity
Ross Gittin is a prolific economics editor with The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald. Ross regularly expresses his thoughts about the relationship between Technology and Productivity and is maybe one of the best thinkers in the country regarding this important topic.
We consider it to be well worth your time to follow Ross's timely thoughts and opinions about technology and productivity in his BLOG and his book (watch the video).
Ross Gittins writes a regular column in the Sydney Morning Herald.
Posted by Wolf Schumacher
Towards More Productive Work
Recently I’ve read a fabulous academic piece with an at first incomprehensible title:
“ Harnessing the Digital Lens to Measure and Manage Information Work. ”
The title alone would not make many practitioners read it - yet it contains some well researched insights for improving white-collar productivity inside our organisations in today's information society.
The most productive workers are brokers of information
An analysis of email traffic showed that information workers at the hub of network traffic were more productive than others, not by sending lots of emails, but by being more influential. An organisation’s best performers are well connected information hubs
The most productive workers quickly send short succinct messages
The researchers found that quick succinct responses correlate with higher productivity. From personal experience I know that an email should only address one topic . The other topics are often not even read by recipients of the message and the information is lost and requires time-consuming rework by the sender, when he eventually finds out about this.
An important insight is to be responsive, yet not to the extent that it harms the flow of work through frequent interruptions. Batching of responses , e.g. at the end of the work day, is an adequate tactic to restore productivity
The most productive workers don’t simply speed up work, but transform it
Operationally successful people don’t merely speed up existing work, but multitask, i.e. work on more tasks at the same time than people that perform their work consecutively. But there is a limit to multitasking. When a person takes on too many tasks at the same time, the sum of the individual preparation times for each task may require the whole time available and there is no output for most tasks. The secret is to multitask easily and effectively, not just piling up more work in a limited time bucket.
The most productive workers use IT to swap low value for high value information processing
Surprisingly, the research showed that managers who reported the greatest levels of information overload were not the ones managing the greatest amount of information. Instead, executives who practiced delegating routine tasks to specialized technology and / or staff were handling significantly greater information flows without feeling information overload. This tactic of clearly differentiating between low value and high value information processing tasks is key for improving on productivity and revenue streams.
For example from our own work, moving accountants away from keying in client transactions and using an advanced data preparation tool such as our own RSDataWeb, allows to have these accountants perform much higher value work, such as advising clients in tax matters.
Successful managers decentralize information and decision-making
It makes a lot of sense for management to identify, document and share best practices. This requires often changing the management style altogether.
They need to avoid being information bottlenecks (e.g. attending all meetings) and instead distribute and automate information processing. Reducing reporting levels, training and empowering members of the workforce are only a few elements of that new strategy. Required are fundamental changes to the embedded cultures of their organizations.
Successful managers combine incentives, corporate culture and IT into one solution
Research shows that massive productivity gains can be achieved by simultaneously implementing improvements in all three areas at the same time versus in isolation. When management combines incentives with policies to promote information sharing and enabling technologies, they see tangible results of higher productivity. Policies, group bonus systems and Web-based IT technologies that promote collaboration produce better results than policies, incentive systems and standalone desktop IT solutions that strengthen competition between staff members.
Successful managers provide constructive feedback
Successful strategies for information rich environments of today can’t only be top down, even though modern data-driven IT systems can drive command and control structures. On the contrary, the centralized data flow within an organisation should support local decisions. This helps to empower workers by e.g. having access to fine-grained benchmark data which allows them to compare their performances among themselves. Employees should be given the tools to figure things out for themselves and to change work processes where necessary for better results
Successful managers create platforms for continuous learning and experimentation
In the mass data environments of today, learning and experimentation becomes more relevant for studying the outcomes of alternative strategies and actions. It is no longer the reliance on HIPPOs (the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion), but rather the reliance on automatically prepared “hard” data, that makes the difference. The digital infrastructure of the organisation lends itself to be used as a platform for continuous learning and experimenting with various tactics for better outcomes. The biggest barrier to this is not Technology, which is readily available. Rather it can be the organizational structure and its culture, which may stand in the way of designing the organisation’s future.
My thanks go to Sinan Aral, NYU New York, Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Cambridge Mass, and Marshall Van Alstyne, Boston U, Boston, for providing with their wonderful article the basis for this blog entry.
Author: Wolf Schumacher
