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Ireland:
Entering the Age of Diminished Expectations?
By
Clive Ryan, Director, Advisory Services
Boosting
the productivity of the business workplace
During Ireland's fifteen-year
economic boom, Ireland has transformed from a low-cost manufacturing
economy to a high-cost services economy. Our economic success
has masked a troubling problem: the indigenous services sector
productivity is low, with important repercussions for Ireland's
GDP and competitiveness. The imperative for decision makers
in key services sectors like retail and finance is to find
an answer to these questions: how can they increase productivity
in their workplace, and what is currently holding them back?
The
connectivity-productivity trap
The operation of the services
sector is extremely people oriented. Despite their diversity
of occupations, staff in services sectors as unrelated as
transport, power supply, telecommunications, construction
and advertising all need to find, analyse and share information
in order to do their daily work. What these people do with
information determines the “output” of the sector.
Major gains in productivity can be achieved by diagnosing
and addressing failings in the way they communicate and handle
that information.
The explosion in connectivity for information workers was initially a boon, letting them take out-of-office calls by mobile or answer e-mail on the fly by Blackberry. But “connectivity overload” hinders productivity. Time-poor information workers are forced to navigate too many channels to find the information or the people they need, in order to make a decision and move to the next task.
The changing nature of work makes the problem more acute. Increasingly, workers come together in temporary, cross-disciplinary teams for project based work, involving intensive communication and collaboration. Fifteen or thirty minutes lost each day in searching for phone numbers, playing voicemail tag or hunting through a crowded inbox for an attachment add up to thousands of lost hours of productivity across the business.
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Unifying
Communications to boost productivity
Retaining all the existing communication channels available
to the information worker - but making them available
through a single access point - can dramatically streamline
communications and collaboration. This is unified communications
(UC) and collaboration, and there are three major areas
to consider in your UC strategy:
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Unified communications: All e-mail,
fixed and mobile voice communications, voice mail and
instant messages become available through one inbox,
via a single device. This is enhanced with one-click
access to online collaborative workspaces and desktop
video conferencing. Underpinning this is an IP-enabled
UC infrastructure that makes it far easier to contact
a colleague. As the system detects the person's "presence"
state, it makes a live connection via the most appropriate
communication platform whenever possible, depending
on the person's availability. .
Communications enabled business processes (CEBP):
The concept of presence is extended to make workflow
and task routing more intelligent. For example, a bank
worker processing a loan application needs Supervisor
A's approval to authorise a loan over €10,000. With
CEBP, the system can detect that Supervisor A is temporarily
unavailable and route the request to Supervisor B, who
can also provide the authorisation. The system lets
the loan be processed more efficiently because it prevents
the workflow from hitting a "human delay".
Communications enabled management analytics:
a UC infrastructure allows transactional information
to be analysed and represented using a dashboard style
interface for management. Available information could
include customer facing business intelligence, such
as time-to-reply across all channels (telephone, e-mail
or instant message).
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Analysing and implementing
unified communications in your enterprise will consume
valuable IT department resources. Taking advantage of
labour-saving IT delivery models like managed services
and virtualisation (see the previous
issue of IT Perspective) can free up the time your
IT resources need to maximise the unified communications
opportunity.
What
can eircom Advisory Services do for you?
For practical or strategic
guidance with your plans for improving workplace productivity,
please don't hesitate to contact me or my colleagues
at eircom Advisory Services.
Contact Clive Ryan at ryanc@eircom.ie,
or Jim Urell jurell@eircom.ie
or visit www.eircom.ie/advisoryservices
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Strategy
Email to a colleague