The Next Stage of Workplace Evolution
Agility Delivered by Empowered People
Information workers are paid to provide insight and drive business value. In reality, though, much of their time is wasted on mundane, nuts-and-bolts tasks. These workers can often spend hours a week searching for information, finding the right
people to collaborate with on the problem, or responding to e-mails. All because companies have not figured out how to create or provide tools or solutions that enable this kind of “unstructured work.”
Most investments in IT solutions, in contrast, are spent on applications for structured work—enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and plant-floor systems, for example, have been used to automate tasks and improve the productivity of workers who do repeatable tasks dictated by processes. These processes are well understood and any problems that arise can be solved by discreet, but expensive technologies. Furthermore, the return on investment (ROI) for such
automation projects can be calculated relatively easily.
Because the unstructured work commonly performed by information workers cannot be handled by large transactional systems, IT has devoted relatively little time and effort to ‘automating’ the bulk of information tasks. In most organizations, for
example, thousands of information workers spend hundreds of thousands of hours a year manually preparing status reports, because this task involves a number of smaller discrete processes for which no single complete solution exists. To complicate matters, each group within the organization likely performs such common tasks differently, using different tools and different formats. This unproductive use of information workers’ time is repeated day after day in a variety of activities.
This whitepaper is written by Bob Anderson and Greg Rivera from Microsoft’s Information Worker Business Strategy team. Download the full PDF below.
Related Links
