CFO Briefing: Information Worker Productivity

www.ndmc.uk.com

CFO BRIEFING: INFORMATION

WORKER PRODUCTIVITY

IAN TOMLIN

APRIL 2012

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Contents

Contents .............................................................................................................................................. 3

Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 4

What is an Information Worker and why do Economies Care? ..................................... 5

What is Productivity? ...................................................................................................................... 5

Inhibitors to Information Worker Productivity (IWP) ......................................................... 6

Organizational Effectiveness ....................................................................................................... 7

Worker Empowerment and Job Skills ................................................................................... 10

Tapping into Resources beyond the Firewall of the Enterprise .................................. 12

Communities and Communications ...................................................................................... 13

Inflexible and Poor Quality Information Technology ..................................................... 14

Red Tape and Sub-Optimal Process Design ...................................................................... 16

Re-Qualifying what it is to be a Productive Information Worker .............................. 17

Definition .......................................................................................................................................... 17

Customer Value Creation – The Productivity and Profitability Link .......................... 18

Re-Designing the Organization for Step Change Productivity ................................... 18

An Organization Equipped to Embrace Change .............................................................. 18

Alignment of Actions to Outcomes ....................................................................................... 19

Impact of Economic Pathways ................................................................................................. 20

Systematic Management ........................................................................................................... 20

Redesigning Enterprise Systems for Step Change Productivity ................................. 21

Customer Value Management (CVM) ................................................................................... 21

Action Framework ......................................................................................................................... 21

Learning and Knowledge Framework ................................................................................... 22

Socially Oriented Architecture (Re-defining ‘SOA’) ......................................................... 22

The Pathway to Enterprise Information Worker Productivity ...................................... 26

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 29

Glossary and References ............................................................................................................ 30

Glossary............................................................................................................................................. 30

References ....................................................................................................................................... 31

Contact information ..................................................................................................................... 32

About the Author .......................................................................................................................... 32

About NDMC Ltd .......................................................................................................................... 32

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Chief Financial Officers should care about Information Worker

Productivity because it represents a key area of sub-optimal

performance in organizations today and is set to be a rich source of

competitive advantage tomorrow. The pathway to achieving

substantially higher information worker productivity can only be

achieved by tackling the inhibiting factors that exist within the office

environment today. It calls for a rethink in many areas;

organizational role, design, management behaviours, computing

systems and a re-evaluation of the role humans play in the fulfilment

of business processes.

Introduction

Peter Drucker, arguably the founding father of present day management

consulting wrote - “The most important achievement of the 20th century was a 50-

fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker. The most important

contribution of management in the 21st century will be to increase the productivity

of the knowledge worker by a similar amount…and that this is the biggest

challenge of developing countries and will become their only possible source of

competitive advantage. On this rests the prosperity of the Western World and the

future of its developed economies.”

Much has been learnt about what makes information workers less productive

thanks to a myriad of knowledge management, change management and business

process improvement experiences. This paper draws on that learning.

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What is an Information Worker and why do Economies Care?

The term Knowledge Worker was first coined by Peter Drucker in 1959, as ‘one who

works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the

workplace.’ The term Information Worker has entered the modern vernacular of

business more recently and describes an individual whose economic value is

measured in part by their production or use of information.

It is now broadly accepted that the economic consequences of failing to increase

the productivity of information workers is much greater than was first thought

when the perception of knowledge workers was scoped down to only roles

associated with the development of knowledge. Most employment roles in a 21st

century economy demand some use of computers and information aggregation,

analysis or dissemination. As such, the number of information workers as a

proportion of workforce for any economy is substantially greater than the number

of roles whose main capital is knowledge; roles that might be found in sectors such

as education, research, healthcare, sciences, marketing, media, journalism, creative

arts and information and communications technology.

What is Productivity?

The 1Grattan Institute describes ‘Productivity’ simply as: ‘what you get out for what

you put in’. The Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and

Research adopt a more precise definition, describing productivity as ‘a measure of

the rate at which units of output of goods and services are produced per unit of

input (for example labour, capital and raw materials).’

Traditional measurements of Information Worker Productivity have focused on

effort or number transactions produced in any given time period but this paper

argues a more effective measure is the level of improvement to contributions made

by individuals towards organizational outcomes (i.e. as valued by the stakeholders

of the enterprise – shareholders, customers, employees, partners, communities

where the organization operates etc.) balanced against the level of investment

made over time.

Few organizations adopt such measures today.

How organizations articulate their performance outcomes can vary and this makes

comparison difficult. Some of the more common mechanisms include a balanced

scorecard of objectives, by listing golden threads of sustainability or by adopting

triple bottom line (‘TBL’) measures. For more information about these

management systems, please visit the glossary.

In the United States, 4attempts have been made to measure the contribution of

Information Technology investments by qualifying Information Productivity, or IP,

which is profit left after subtracting the cost of capital invested by shareholders,

divided by a company's costs—selling, general and administrative expenses. But

this narrow approach to productivity measurement resulting from ‘IT investment’

ignores the potential multiplier contributions that better tools bring to working

practises and the value they produce.

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The management truism, ‘If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ applies to

productivity to. While organizations continue to ignore the need to measure

Information Worker Productivity correctly, they are unlikely to achieve the step-

change improvements they seek.

Inhibitors to Information Worker Productivity (IWP)

Today’s Information Workers are assessed for their productivity effectiveness

against a ‘what is deemed reasonable’ backdrop based on existing methods and

technologies. These methods and tools support and encourage norms of

behaviour that are taken to be ‘the best option available’ due partly to a lack of

willingness to innovate and also through the powerful influence of leading

software companies like Microsoft® and Adobe® that have come to dictate

perceptions of what good looks like and the pace of office technology evolution.

A business analyst tasked with making an assessment of costs for a business line or

process would not be chastised for (1) emailing the various interested parties to

engage them in the process, (2) export data from the source business systems, (3)

create an Excel spreadsheet to make sense of the data, (4) produce a PowerPoint

presentation to present findings to managers and (5) present the findings in a 2-

hour meeting. While all of these tasks are today deemed acceptable operating

methods and justified to fulfil the request, there are irrefutable inefficiencies in

each stage of this process.

There may also be associated ‘hidden’ areas of productivity wastage such as (1) the

reasons for this work might not have been justified, (2) perhaps the analysis already

existed in a different part of the business, or (3) perhaps the drivers for the activity

changed and notification of this fact was not passed down the line to the analyst

and so all of this work might be for no result.

While this example suggests a tiny chard of the sort of operating behaviours that

happen in every office today, it does provide an indicative example of the

Information Worker Productivity gap that exists between ‘what is deemed

reasonable today’ and what can be achieved.

In a document titled ‘Wastage adds up despite motivated workers’ that reports on

a survey of almost 2,500 workers, across various industries, regions and from all

levels within organizations in both the private and public sector, Ernst and Young

puts forward four areas where Australian organizations are most likely to find

inhibitors to productivity, namely:

1. Organization structure, design and operating model — Removing all

wasteful, bureaucratic, and non-value work and outputs

2. Technology — Being more ambitious and effective in process automation

and technological change

3. People management issues — Developing and utilising the full talents

and capabilities of human capital

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4. Innovation - Being deliberate and audacious with an innovation agenda

In rating the influences on individual productivity across these four specific areas,

over half of respondents (54%) say people management issues have the biggest

impact. Around 1 in 4 (23%) see organization structure, design and operating

model as a key influence, while others cite innovation (15%) and technology (8%).

This report (referred to hereafter as the ‘Pulse Report’) is a useful perspective on

the present real-world state of the ‘typical information worker environment’ and

the size of the challenge facing organizations seeking to improve the productivity

of their information workers.

The remainder of this section is dedicated to the contributory factors that

encourage the sub-optimal status quo in Information Worker Productivity that

exists in most organizations today.

Organizational Effectiveness

The effectiveness of organizational design and management remains poor in a

wide number of public and private sector organizations. These aspects of sub-

optimal organizational design described in the book 8Agilization. Below I

summarise the key issue areas and their impact on IWP.

Management Style, Culture and Brand Love

We live in an increasingly brand conscious and brand-aware world. The more

commerce moves to digital platforms, the closer consumers want to get to the

brands they trust. Brand has no value if not in the eyes of customers – and when

customers do see value in a brand, it is the customers that become the owners of

the brand, not the organization. In 2004, Kevin Roberts, then CEO Worldwide for

Saatchi & Saatchi 14

wrote, ‘The Idealism of Love is the new Realism of business. By

building Respect and inspiring Love, business can move the world.’ When Apple®

launches its newest gadget these days, it’s their customers that produce the

product videos, explain the benefits and why it’s so cool!

The values that customers see in a brand become the essence of an organization

and define the way it needs to think and act. In this paradigm, the organization

becomes an empty vessel that can be ‘anything it needs to be’. This concept of the

organization is a departure from the notion that an organization is ‘an office

building, a set or contracts and policies or some form of ‘people owner’.

21st century organizations must stand for core values that stakeholders want to be

associated with. The organization is no longer a legal entity, a series of contracts

and policies or a collection of mechanised business processes that produces

‘widgets’, it is the embodiment of a set of values, attitudes, behaviours and

outcomes that people choose to be associated with.

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A 10

survey conducted by communications group BT of 120 young professionals in

the UK found that more than one-third thought working for a caring and

responsible employer was more important than the salary they earned.

Organizations that adopt a *command and control management style originating

from the last century of mechanisation are finding workforce productivity levels

progressively falling. This is because workers too want to join a brand journey with

people who share their values; they don’t want to be owned or told what to do

without first knowing why.

Adding to pressures for change in the employer-employee relationship is the fact

that young people of Generation-Y now joining the workforce repel the idea of a

job for life. For Gen-Y, life is too short to commit it to a soul-less organization.

Those armed with appropriate skills know those skills are in high demand as the

baby boomer generation approaches retirement. In this war for talent, businesses

that have modern perspectives on the role and function of the organization – such

as a strong brand story, adopt an ethical ethos, satisfy employee demands for the

right working conditions, offer a ‘coffee house’ styled environment and work-time

flexibility - are winning the higher calibre of staff.

Research by 9The Economist in 2006 found that the median tenure for workers ages

55-64 in the United States was 9.3 years. For workers in the 25-43 age group, the

median tenure was 2.9 years.

For organizations that have employed a command and control management style

for many years, and where departmental silos have evolved around the self-

interest of senior managers, installing a *modern management style that is

characterised by a flat management team structure, project-based activity

planning, embracing employee empowerment and flexible working, with a strong

social orientation is to say the least difficult.

Information Worker Productivity revolves around the reality that human beings are

not machines; they have a soul and will produce more when energized by rewards

or impassioned by core values and the feeling they’re contribution is making a

difference to something they believe in.

Organizations that insist on a ‘stick and no carrot’ approach to management,

imagine themselves to live in an era when employees would ‘do what we tell them

to do’. The world has moved on. Employers that tell employees what to do, but

don’t explain why are unlikely to achieve the productivity gains they seek.

Vision and Leadership

Pulse Report Findings ’ Around 1-in-5 respondents (22%) say they

don’t have a clear vision of what is expected of them in their role, 41% do

not agree organizational effectiveness and efficiency had the right level of

focus and attention, while 39% of respondents do not think their

organization operates effectively.’

*This traditional top-down

‘command and control’ method of

organizational management style

is often paralleled to the way an

orchestra works with defined roles,

pre-scripted musical scores and a

conductor….

*This modernist management

style based on strong brand values

and self-empowerment is

sometimes paralleled with a Jazz

band where there is no specified

leader, roles are defined but less

tightly scoped and the tune is

broadly understood but does not

constrain the creative versatility of

the individual.

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Not all organizations have a meaningful vision that’s well articulated so that

employees, customers and other stakeholders can feel engaged by it. For those

organizations that do have a clearly stated vision, fewer still have implemented

strategies to achieve desired outcomes.

A Fortune® magazine study published in the 2000’s found that “Less than 10% of

strategies effectively formulated are executed”.

By definition, a leader is someone who has followers. It is incumbent on leaders to

create the empowering environment that causes employees and third party project

contributors to want to follow their direction (embracing the management

principle that a disengaged employees is likely to be less productive than one that

is). This starts with a compelling vision. According to John Case of Inc. Magazine,

‘a company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the

business rather than as hired hands’. This sound common sense underpins the

concept of ‘open-book management’; that information received by employees

should not only help them do their jobs effectively, but help them understand how

the company is doing as a whole (Kidwell & Scherer, 2001).

If an organization does not know (or cannot agree on) what it is trying to achieve,

it’s unlikely they ever will be successful. Organizations that display poor clarity of

purpose and lack leadership are unlikely to create the empowered workplace that

Generation-Y information workers will in future expect.

Organization Design

Few organizations review their departmental budgets against strategic plans in a

way that ensures budgeted activities are directly aligned to desired objectives.

Evidence from change management projects suggest that it’s common for over

one third of planned actions articulated in budget documents to have little or no

association with stated strategic outcomes.

Strategic planning methods like balanced scorecard help organizations to shape

their objectives and turn formulated strategy into action but practitioners often

miss out the vital step of validating strategic plans against existing budget plans.

In consequence, departmental managers can continue to discharge departmental

activities that make no significant impact on strategic outcomes – wasting

hundreds of man-hours each year.

Silos of Operation

Dr Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints states that the core constraint of

organizations is that they are structured, measured and managed in parts, rather

than as a whole. This produces lower-than-expected productivity with constraints

constantly shifting from one place to another and chronic conflicts between

people representing different parts of the organization. In most organizations

founded in the 20th century, the problem of departmental silos pervades. Over

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time, organizations inadvertently encourage departments to be self-sufficient by

installing incentives that promote achievement of department outcomes over

organizational goals. They let departments form their own management structures,

information technology systems and operating procedures.

Organizations that fail to align departmental budgets to strategic outcomes create

high time and money wastage. Information Workers might be passionate about

what they do and work very hard, but it might well be that their energy is being

spent on activities that have little or no direct impact on the ‘things the

organization cares about’.

A key constraint to Information Worker Productivity is the existence of operating

silos and their impact on how activities are assigned, resourced and delivered.

Worker Empowerment and Job Skills

When individuals do not feel engaged or empowered, they produce less. Factors

that impact on engagement include leadership quality, organizational design,

access to technology, the extent to which an individual feels their skills are being

developed and leveraged, and their job rewards and opportunities for career

advancement.

Organizational design shapes management attitudes towards how work teams

should function. Organizations that adopt a command and control management

philosophy will also seek to install very tight job definitions for their employees

that constrain the productivity of teams. People who are targeted to make very

specific contributions to a project will normally only deliver the minimum expected

of their role.

11In 1949, Eric Trist of the Tavistock Institute for Social Research (the Tavvy) spent

his time at the Haighmoor seam in Durham analysing the team working behaviors

of coal miners. Trisk identified that when imposed team structures were adopted

(the conventional model), miners that were organized by managers would commit

only to their allocated task and would consequently only enter into a few very

limited social relationships sharply divided between those within his task group

and those outside. With ‘outsiders’ these task- constrained miners shared no sense

of belongingness and neither would they feel any responsibility to them for the

consequences of their actions. In contrast, work teams that organized themselves

would take ownership of the shared outcomes of the team, they would have more

relationships, deeper emotional ties and they would discharge more tasks. Of most

interest, workers operating within these informal work-team structures were more

productive than those who discharged specific tasks as part of the conventional

model.

Pulse Report Findings A key relationship exists between age and

motivation levels given that respondents from the 65+ age bracket are the

most enthused, with 85% saying they are motivated to perform to their

highest capacity, which is a stark contrast to 53% from the 15—19 age

(Gen-Y) bracket.

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A growing gap is emerging between successive generations on attitudes towards

employers and employment that Ian Tomlin reports in his book 5Cloud Coffee

House. Workers of the mechanised age expected a job for life in return for their

life-time commitment to the success of an organization. In contrast, it’s not

considered ‘cool’ to be a part of Generation-Y and commit to a career with any

organization unless it is engaged in social activities, healthcare, science or charity!

Pulse Report Findings ’An overwhelming 71% state they are motivated

to do their job to the best of their ability yet only 62% say their skills are

strongly utilised by their employer, leaving a staggering 38% of workers

with skills that could potentially be used more productively in other areas.

Only in the last decade have social networking technologies existed to enable

Information Workers to profile their skills on workgroup systems giving colleagues

(and organizations) the means to realise the potential of the people they work

with. When an individual is recruited to fulfil the needs of a job role, rarely is the

full extent of their experience made visible to the organization that recruits them.

When appointed for a specific role, other related knowledge skills are discarded.

Individuals KNOW when their skills aren’t being fully utilised by a role and the

consequential impact on the individual is normally to (1) feel undervalued, or (2) to

seek alternative employment options. As organizations adapt their design to

embrace a more project-oriented approach to discharging activities, they have the

means to leverage more of the skills (and the knowledge and experience) that

exists within their people.

Pulse Report Findings Forty-two per cent of respondents didn’t agree

they had the right training to apply the technology they have access to

effectively.’

Information Workers that lack the essential tools to discharge their roles, or

possess the expertise to appreciate workarounds and better ways of working, will

be inherently less productive than counterparts equipped with the skills to tools to

perform their allocated roles.

There exists and accepted norm of behaviour within organizations to adopt ‘one-

size-fits-all’ shrink-wrapped software applications and, where no off-the-shelf

solution exists, to build bespoke applications using a variety of ad-hoc tools. The

resulting malaise of disjointed applications results in workers having to learn many

‘systems’ to discharge their roles combining new interfaces, analysis, reporting and

communications components. This creates and unsustainable training burden,

further exaggerated by increased workforce turnover.

According to the 12

eLearning Network, the key challenges facing learning

practitioners today are:

1. Effective learning

The value of training interventions on training outcomes.

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The challenges of moving training out of the class-room.

The value of content re-use (and the means to achieve it).

Making training relevant to all – how to support a blended approach

to course delivery that supports different training styles and modes.

2. Distributed learning

Facilitating learning using web and mobile devices as a delivery and

engagement vehicle to reduce costs and share resources.

Encourage the recycling of knowledge/content through social

networking and collaboration.

Increasing knowledge creation through sharing, debate and practical

real-world experiences.

In addition to the above, the organizational challenges facing learning managers

includes (1) finding the resources and know-how to develop courses, (2) justifying

funds for investment and, (3) obtaining commitments from departmental

managers to release their staff for formal training.

Learning experts acknowledge that the majority of learning happens ‘on the-job’.

Today’s social networking tools have the potential to not just re-use but also grow

knowledge resources through day-to-day social interactions. Unfortunately, these

technologies have yet to gain critical mass, so their true contribution to on-the-job

learning remains unclear.

Tapping into Resources beyond the Firewall of the Enterprise

Many senior executives and departmental managers envision of their organization

as an isolated entity that exists ‘within the firewall’. People are qualified as being

either people with assigned permissions on the inside (employees), or everyone else

– contractors, customers, suppliers, shareholders etc. As I outline in 8Agilization,

the world of business today is far less black and white. Individuals and

organizations that interact with an organization on a day-to-day basis will often

retain valuable content, skills and insights that could be leveraged to reduce

operating costs and generate new customer value were it accessible. Surrounding

an organization by a moat and draw-bridge discourages these pockets of valuable

assets from being released.

A new century of business calls for new ways of thinking about how an

organization exists within its ecosystem of supply-chain links, channels to market,

social and community responsibilities, and industry. Few businesses today can

deliver their fullest customer value without contributions from third parties. The

notion that ALL of the resources and ALL of the data needed to fulfil business

process needs should be met by internal capabilities alone is at best naïve.

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No longer is an organization able to see itself as a discrete entity. Organizations

that fail to embrace third party resources, know-how, content and social networks

(etc.) will have less productive workers as a consequence. In most industries,

organizations need to work in partnership with third party organizations and

communities to deliver optimal customer value. Participating and nurturing these

economic pathways demands that organizations SHARE and POOL resources. In

order to call on expert resources that exist outside of the enterprise, cultural,

technological and organizational design barriers must be overcome.

Communities and Communications

Pulse Report Findings ’Only 58% is spent on work that directly adds

real value while 24% of the day spent on networking, personal

development and other organizational curricular activities.’

Organizations that fail to appreciate the connection between social networking and

productivity enablement view the periods workers spend on business social

networking sites as ‘time wasted’. A growing volume of evidence is forming that

evidences how social networking on cloud-based real-time platforms can offer a

step-change advantage to worker productivity IF it is appropriated harnessed.

These benefits come in the form of:

Better ‘team’ productivity

Breaking down silos of activity, silos of data and silos of skill that make

business processes inherently more costly to deliver and less effective

Appreciation of, and access to, knowledge and skills ‘pools’

Richer customer insights and greater opportunity for first mover

advantage through the delivery of fine-grained, contextualised and event-

driven intelligence

Access to new opportunities through third party social connections

Stronger brand affinity within an industry or market sector owing to an

organization’s reputation and credentials within key online communities

Development of on-the-job know-how and skills

Improved allocation of project resources

Adoption of more efficient ways of communicating (less travel, fewer

meetings, less time overhead on individuals)

Reduced administrative overheads (as key data – such as understanding

how people spend their time – is captured as part of the day job) and less

red-tape made possible by greater transparency and trust

Less time spent on aggregating, re-purposing and sharing knowledge

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In his book 13

Social Operating Systems Ian Tomlin interviews Rohit Banerji, senior

consultant and expert in asset performance in the Utilities sector. It examples the

opportunity presented by social networking approaches to impact on business

efficiencies. Rohit believes that the Utilities sector has seriously missed a trick by

not harnessing knowledge held in the heads and social networks of technicians

and engineers on the ground. Rohit explains, “’When it comes to social

collaboration, utilities still rely on ideas forums, suggestion schemes, knowledge

portals etc. – traditional approaches and models that have proven not to work in

the past but are nevertheless ‘corporately acceptable’. What utilities desperately

need is a way of capturing knowledge held at the local level as business as usual,

distilling it and then having the means to analyse and share it. This is because

the cost of reacting to an event that’s already happened can be 3 to 6 times more

than the cost of anticipating and preventing it.”

Something like 20 to 30% is held at management level - so the people that have

the data don’t need it, but the people that need it (senior managers) don’t have it.

“Utilities firms are forced to plan with poor data because conventional ways of

eliciting knowledge from people on ground (by way of direct communications

workshops and conversations) cannot be scaled up to cover the enormous

number of assets that these companies typically own. Over the last few years the

industry has spent millions of dollars on business intelligence systems that are

over-analysing poor quality data – a drive fuelled by regulators, who need data to

review the companies’ plans and an incumbent resistance to change from those

who perform the analysis.

Utilities companies have evolved coping strategies to live with poor data, of

which there are generally two. These are:

1. Modelling the behaviour of groups of similar assets and then generalising it

for individual assets. The problem with this approach is that it’s generally

been inaccurate to the point of being unusable for individual equipment i.e.,

the level at which decisions are made.

2. To shorten the decision cycle through real-time processes – the next best

thing to do if you cannot anticipate failure is to build capabilities to react

faster!”

Exploiting online communities holds the key to success for many organizations in

the 21st century. The power of social networks to unite groups with common

interests and common goals represents unprecedented opportunities for those

organizations with the brand credentials and know-how to energise third party

endorsements. Appreciating customer interests and passions of online

communities is a crucial component of the new 21st century business toolkit.

The potential exists to achieve a transformation in Information Worker Productivity

through adoption of Social Office technologies and the new approaches to

addressing organizational outcomes it offers.

Inflexible and Poor Quality Information Technology

Pulse Report Findings ’While an overwhelming 71% of respondents

said they were motivated to do their job to the best of their ability, 39%

didn’t agree they had access to the right technology.’

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It seems incredible that with so much investment made into business software over

recent years that almost 1 in 2 workers lack essential technology to fulfil their role.

Nevertheless, the level of dissatisfaction associated with poor software applications

and office productivity tools appears still to be growing.

A 7report produced by IT consulting firm Accenture Information Management in

2007, following an online survey of more than 1,000 middle managers of large

companies in the United States and United Kingdom (the purpose of which was

to uncover wide-ranging insights about the way Information Workers gather, use

and analyse information), found that more than 50 per cent of the information

they obtain has no value to them.

More than half (57 percent) of respondents said that having to go to numerous

sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing information for

their jobs. In order to get information about competitors, customers, project

responsibility or another department, respondents said they have to go to three

different information sources, on average. In addition, 40 percent of respondents

said that other parts of the company are not willing to share information, and 36

percent said there is so much information available that it takes a long time to

actually find the right piece of data.

Current approaches to enterprise IT are stifling workforce productivity (these are

described in more detail in 8Agilization):

Data silos created by use of discrete applications.

It’s thought that up to 60% of content in most businesses is held in back-

office systems and in most cases, information workers have to login to

more than six applications in order to access it. This creates huge user

frustration and poor knowledge worker productivity. It also means most

middle managers are starved of the insights they need to make

operational decisions.

Use of documents as a mechanism for data aggregation and sharing.

Unstructured data (data held within emails, messages, documents and

Web page articles) is very difficult to re-use. According to empirical data

the average office document is read less than 5 times before it gets

discarded. People struggle to agree what content is valuable and how it

should be indexed for later use. This results in large volumes of content

rich data from being hidden away from ‘the organization’ in hard-drives

and files. Use of office documents is seen to be one of the biggest

inhibitors to IWP.

Over-reliance on email as a method of collaboration.

Email is not an efficient communication method for Information Workers –

it consumes a large amount of time in personal administration, encourages

an asynchronous communications culture (sometimes used as a

mechanism to avoid engaging people in ‘live’ conversation) and worse still,

when people use email it’s difficult to measure the extent to which

communications are contributing to a process or represent a distraction.

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For a functional perspective, email is unsecure, manages content poorly

and encourages discussions to be fragmented. Alternatives to email are

emerging in the social office communications space and are set to create a

step-change when they finally achieve market acceptance.

Poor tools to capture tacit intelligence

The information that passes between colleagues on a daily basis is

recognised by organizations as being valuable to develop better

understanding customer needs and issues, problem resolution etc. but

current systems of knowledge interchange - asynchronous email, back-

office systems that don’t integrate with one another or share data, over

reliance on office documents and ‘custom’ software solutions – are

acknowledged as being poor at capturing and exploiting this knowledge.

With incumbent office systems, huge gaps in knowledge exist, such as:

Who knows who (and what are the strength of ties)? Who does what? Who

contributes to which discussion? Who is best at solving problems? Who are

the go-to people in the organization? What happened last time this

problem occurred?

Information workers experience content overload and lack effective tools

to access and use information in a way they want and need to.

Workers are not equipped to exploit their ‘networks’ to achieve outcomes.

Applications are a poor match to user needs difficult to learn, often

poorly integrated, too expensive to adapt.

Pulse Report Findings ‘Fifty—one per cent say that further innovation

would increase productivity, 49% acknowledge a clear and compelling case

for innovation and 51% acknowledge they have the opportunity to

suggest new ideas. In contrast, 44% did not agree their organization gives

innovation the right focus and attention, 59% did not agree innovation

was adequately recognised and rewarded and 48% did not agree good

ideas were implemented.’

Today’s information technology tools and approaches produce a sub-optimal

operating environment for Information Workers.

Red Tape and Sub-Optimal Process Design

Growth in the number of policies and procedures organizations must adhere to is a

common challenge to organizations in any territory. But the way organizations

install their policies can itself create a larger overhead. It’s not uncommon for

threads of policy – quality, risk, information security, health and safety,

environmental policy, diversity etc. – to be managed separately using document-

intensive systems. This makes governance and administration significantly more

17 © 2012 NDMC Ltd


time intensive; not just for administrators but for departments that must comply

with polices.

As organizations grow they develop departmental structures and these structures

develop or inherit business processes and tools to fulfil their role. But rarely do

departments ‘start again’ with a fresh piece of paper and revisit their processes

from a ‘use case value’ basis. This means bad practise becomes endemic and is

not contested because ‘it’s the way we’ve always done it’. Organizations that have

used process re-design methods such as Six Sigma to re-visit their processes often

start from assumptions that already exist in the organization such as ‘what matters

most to customers?’ and ‘how do we produce customer value?’ and whilst this can

help to do things better, it often misses the opportunity to do better things.

The British Management Consultant Sir John Harvey Jones wrote, ‘The basics of the

business must be as efficient as human beings can make them: they always

deteriorate over time unless somebody deliberately tightens them up. But nothing

is sacred. Organizations must be prepared to kill any aspect of their structure or

operating approach that gets in the way of its ultimate ambition.’

Few organizations have an agenda, or the empowered resources, to repeatedly

question why they do what they do, and seek to improve it.

Pulse Report Findings ’20% say their organization needs to reduce

bureaucracy and red—tape. A further 16% say processes and systems need to

be simplified.’

Policy adoption approaches that rely on discrete systems or documents to manage

compliance create abnormally high level of operational overheads that lead to a

reduction in Information Worker Productivity.

Re-Qualifying what it is to be a Productive Information Worker

This section sets the bar on areas of potential productivity improvement attained

through innovation in methods and tools.

Definition

A productive Information Worker in the 21st century is someone who contributes

more to stated organizational outcomes in less time.

This measure of IWP is a departure from assessments of productivity focused on

numbers of documents produced or numbers of transactions processed. To

MEASURE productivity in these redefined terms requires an understanding of what

the organizational outcomes are and an appreciation of the linkages between

worker ‘effort’ and the ‘contribution’ it produces to serve the outcome.

18 © 2012 NDMC Ltd


Customer Value Creation – The Productivity and Profitability Link

Increases in IWP should generate more Customer Value. Generating higher levels

of customer value than alternatives is one of the simplest ways of measuring

competitive advantage. The globalisation of markets resulting from the growing

use of the Internet and mobile communications means that consumers of products

and services have more choices. To compete, organizations need to be better than

their rivals at identifying what matters most to customers and how to deliver it.

Jack C. Welch, former CEO of General Electric Company said, ‘An organization’s

ability to learn, and to transform that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate

competitive business advantage.’

Remarkably, many organizations have no integrated process for learning from

customers or applying what they’ve learnt. Much of the customer feedback that

‘hits’ an organization fails to reach decision makers organization empowered to act

on it and implement change.

In the 21st century the contribution made by human beings to serve business

processes will be less about ‘machine operators’ and more about curiosity,

sourcing innovation, big ideas and the adaptation of processes to events. Sourcing

greater customer value (the ‘output’) from the efforts of Information Workers (the

‘input’) produces one of the more tangible links between productivity and

profitability.

Re-Designing the Organization for Step Change Productivity

This section describes the areas of organizational re-design that are needed create

the necessary environment for a step-change in Information Worker productivity.

An Organization Equipped to Embrace Change

Achieving a step change in Information Worker Productivity demands that workers

spend more time doing better things and this pre-supposes that processes can be

repeatedly and iteratively changed.

In Germany organizations have an organization department that combines all of

the skills necessary to manage change in a business – IT, HR, process change

experts, analysts etc. This has proven returns because it gives authority and

purpose to change agendas. Organizations like Audi Group have gone a step

further and align roles within their IT department to support key processes, so that

IT professionals are directly incentivised to contribute to process improvement

outcomes. This approach also means that individuals develop a richer appreciation

of how processes work and ‘care’ about the outcomes. Any ideas or suggestions

on how to improve processes are embraced by people who are motivated to

achieve improvements.

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When organizations seek to employ all roles through full-time employment

contracts, this creates a structural rigidity that inhibits fast reaction to market

changes. For example, in the 1990’s office equipment vendors suddenly found that

demand for facsimile devices was on the wane and yet software was a fast growing

area. This meant many Japanese manufacturers (that have a policy of staff

retention for life) were required to re-train thousands of hardware engineers to

become software and quality engineers. Similarly when a pharmaceuticals

company suddenly finds demand exists for one treatment at the detriment of

another, finding scientists with the new specialist skills needed to populate a lab

while having to re-train or terminate employment contracts can install inflexibilities

that cause organizations to be less competitive than smaller, specialist start-ups.

The answer to the challenge of workforce rigidity is to employ more staffing

resources on-demand to serve organizational needs as they emerge at any point in

time. The growth in social networking and online talent pools affords many

organizational disciplines this opportunity. But there are risks attached to this

strategy, namely that:

Resources may not be available when needed.

Intellectual property bleeds out.

Causal employment might result in less emotional commitment to the

employer leading to greater truancy, staff churn, conflicts of interest etc.

Alignment of Actions to Outcomes

Achieving a step change in Information Worker Productivity demands that workers

spend more time fulfilling activities that contribute to strategic outcomes. The

Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research signpost this

consideration as one of the most effective ways to boost productivity. In their

submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics

Inquiry into Raising the Level of Productivity Growth in the Australian Economy

(September 2009) they state, ‘increases in productivity can result from minimising

the use of inputs for a given output or maximising output for a given input.’

Organizations must find better ways of getting more value from the efforts made

by Information Workers. One of the best ways of doing this is to reduce the

amount of unnecessary tasks that happen in an organization. Drucker wrote,

‘There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at

all.’ Measuring Information Worker Productivity in terms of outcomes rather than

effort is arguably the single most important contributor to change.

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Impact of Economic Pathways

Economic collaboration across industries means organizations will discharge their

role as part of a process that delivers customer value but they do not own the

process. They become a cog – in a larger process. I call this an economic pathway

because normally there is a very obvious value chain that links each of the

contributing process steps to its outcome. The challenge that faces all parties is

that they must work together in an efficient and effective way to make sure their

economic pathway is better than alternatives.

Illustration of an Economic Pathway

This example of Industry Economic Pathways comes from the UK’s public sector in

the area of traffic management. Highways authorities across the UK are responsible

for managing road networks and they are encouraged by central government to

do this well. Working together with bordering authorities and road works

undertakers (such as utilities), organizations like Transport for London have been

able to dramatically reduce the number of times they dig up the roads (and

thereby create congestion). Central to TfL’s strategy has been the recognition that

their organizational goals cannot be achieved without the support of organizations

that share their economic pathway.

Appreciation by organizational leaders of both the existence and importance of

Economic Pathways to organizational success places demands for new kinds of IT

systems that can bring organizations (their people and their data) together on the

same page – and installs a new set of challenges for IT professionals. Two recent

innovations have made support of communities engaged in Economic Pathways

more practical. These are:

Cloud Computing

Social Operating Systems

Systematic Management

Many organizations rely on the instincts and experience of senior executives but

have few mechanisms to help leaders direct their business strategy in complex

environments, navigate through strategic uncertainty and effectively manage

change in organizations.

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Organizations need to share their plans and involve Information Workers in them if

they are to harvest their energy and ideas. This pre-supposes that plans cascade

through the organization to Information Workers that understand what is expected

of them. A surprisingly small proportion of organizations do this today.

Systematic Management is a term that describes a broad spectrum of formalised

management methods used to provide systems of management as an alternative to

intuition and gut feel. Without Systematic Management approaches, it’s hard to

imagine Information Workers fully appreciating how they can contribute to

projects and activities that span departments, sometimes industries without a

richer understanding of the strategic outcomes they are attempting to fulfil.

Redesigning Enterprise Systems for Step Change Productivity

In this section I profile the ‘systems’ that are required in order to facilitate effective

Information Worker Productivity.

Customer Value Management (CVM)

This is a system and process for managing how organizations acquire, interpret

and apply their customer insights. Whilst CVM systems can be developed using a

collection of tools, what matters most is that systems present:

Clarity over different types of customers.

A method for reliably capturing customer insights.

A single view of the customer experience.

A method of interpreting customer insights including the ability to align

feedback to parts of the organization that can benefit from it.

The ability to turn customer insights into useful products and services.

Adopting a system for capturing and measuring customer value means that

Information Worker contributions oriented towards achieving customer value

outcomes can be measured, and any changes to customer value aspirations can be

quickly adopted in order to maintain alignment between (1) what matters to

customers, (2) what the organization plans to deliver and (3) the activities

Information Workers perform.

Action Framework

Responding to organizational needs to align Information Worker Actions to

Strategic Outcomes, in 2002, management consultants NDMC Ltd created an

Information Worker Action Framework. The Action Framework is a method and

relational database system that gives organizations the means to measure

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Information Worker Productivity by understanding the alignment of Information

Worker actions with strategic outcomes.

As I describe in the book 8Agilization, an Action Framework places Information

Worker actions at the heart of the business planning framework by managing

and measuring four key perspectives. These are:

OUTCOME – Actions must achieve an outcome that benefits the organization.

Any action that does not directly have a relationship to an organizational

outcome is likely to be a waste of resources.

OWNERSHIP – Someone must be accountable for the achievement of outcomes

to which actions contribute. This individual may not be the same person tasked

with performing it. For any action, both ownership of the outcome and ownership

of performing the action should be considered.

LEARNING – Leaders must always question why they are doing what they are

doing. This requires a clear appreciation of what led to actions being formalised.

New information that might influence how an action is performed (or whether it

should be performed at all) should be accessible to the portfolio holder

responsible for the achievement of the outcome.

EVALUATION – Performing any action expends resource. For any action there is

an opportunity cost that should be evaluated so the organization can govern its

behaviours appropriately.

Learning and Knowledge Framework

Organizations seeking to achieve a step change in Information Worker Productivity

will need to equip them with the right skills.

Corporate learning systems of the last decade have placed their focus on

husbanding content more than outcomes and use of sporadic class-room courses

rather than coherent on-the-job development tools and services. A platform for

learning provides a single system for managing the life-cycle of learning –

including on-the-job knowledge development - providing the essential services

needed by systems administrators, educational practitioners, learners and other

stakeholders. Uniquely it places a focus on aligning learning investments to the

level of Information Worker Productivity improvement.

Within a platform for learning, practitioners define learning pathways comprising of

training needs, learning interventions and learning outcomes. This results in the

formation of pathway templates. Learning pathways are created by either

adopting one of the pre-defined templates or by creating a new pathway based on

an assembly of training needs, learning interventions and learning outcomes.

Socially Oriented Architecture (Re-defining ‘SOA’)

Organizations that seek to improve their Information Worker Productivity and

exploit the potential of social networks, industry partnerships and communities

require a new form of computing environment.

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A Social Operating System is an Internet delivered technology platform that

supports the systematic management and facilitation of human social relationships

and interactions. Businesses will come to see Social Operating Systems as a

replacement to high-cost enterprise content management software and person-to-

person communications tools like email that no longer fit the needs of workers or

organizations as the world of work becomes ever more virtualised and

collaborative.

A Social Operating System consists of two main technology layers:

The Inner Layer – the cloud computing platform and administration tooling

This is the infrastructure and tooling layer used by IT people to provision

computing services. Its function is to enable Social Operating Systems super-users

to design and deploy applications. Key attributes include:

Multi-tenant (cloud) hosting infrastructure that provides secure and

resilient 24x7 access to services accessed via a standard Internet Browser.

PCs, consoles and computer servers are being displaced by a gigantic

digital computing platform in the clouds. IT analyst firms predict a

spending spree on cloud computing technologies with some suggesting

that by 2013 nearly one third of IT spending growth will be cloud based.

The ‘cloud’ continues a journey of digital discovery that started in earnest

with the PC and moved into hyper-drive with the World Wide Web.

The ability to manage user identities and groups. These capabilities

give applications developers and administrators the means to architect

portal environments that provide users with self-service administration of

users and groups associated with their secure collaborative spaces.

Data integration tools. These are data connectors and integration

toolkits that enable users to link to data held across the Web and also

from local sources such as text files, documents, Twitter feeds, Instant

Messages, email, databases, spreadsheets and other data types.

Database and data structure creation tools. In support of applications

development it’s often necessary to create data structures. These tools

enable non-technical users to design these structures without exposing

them to complex database administration tools built for IT people.

Process design and management tools. These tools give users the ability

to formalise business processes without needing to be IT experts.

Applications design and deployment tools. These tools de-skill the task

of creating applications. Vendors like Encanvas provide point-and-click or

drag and drop user interfaces to remove the need for programming or

scripting skills.

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The provision of application assemblies. These are ready-made building

blocks used to simplify and de-skill applications design. They cover

frequently used components such as Gant charts, blogs, wikis, opinion

polls, file management, file transfer, geo-spatial mapping, search, print,

instant messaging, charting and other types assemblies that less technical

people can use.

Portal ‘look and feel’ design and configuration. These tools provide

systems administrators with the ability to architect the deployed portal

spaces. When deploying a portal space, administrators require the ability

to setup data source connections, user permissions, menu hierarchies,

appearance settings and many other attributes.

Log files and reporting. These tools give super users knowledge of user

activity, user behaviours and log files required for problem identification.

The Outer Layer

This is the Portal that users of Social Operating Systems will see.

The nine topics of the outer layer Social Operating System are:

1. Security

2. Relationships

3. Communication

4. Content

5. Collaboration

6. Commerce

7. App Store

8. Data Integration

9. Agile Dev.

In his book 13

Social Operating Systems Ian Tomlin interviews Ken Muir is Chief

Technology and Strategy Officer and VP of Product Management, for Collaboration

at Novell. “At Novell we see the ability to support private teams and group

structures as the killer-app for business adoption of social technology. With our

product we empower users to form secure ad-hoc private teams. Workers enjoy a

joined-up collaborate workspace whilst maintaining the privacy and governance

required by business; even when social networking structures extend across

multiple organizations - which in today’s business world is so often the case.”

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Illustration of a Social Operating System (Source: 13

Social Operating Systems, 2008)

A business-critical feature of Social Operating Systems that relates directly to

Information Worker Productivity lies in its ability to capture data as part of the day

job. Social Operating Systems capture everything that happens in the social

networks they support – who communicates with who, content that’s shared,

topics discussed, meetings held, applications and data sources accessed etc. –

which means knowledge of worker productivity is captured in near real-time without

requiring additional layers of reporting overheads like time-sheets, daily activity

logs and reports (etc.) that would otherwise require manual data entry. This tacit

productivity management is essential to effective measurement of IWP.

While many of the aspects of a Social Operating System will be familiar to readers,

two less familiar areas of technology advancement are Data Integration and

Situational Applications.

Data Integration

Enterprise computing has been characterised by the purchase of ‘ready-to-deploy’

applications for specific departments or processes. Even with the promise afforded

by Enterprise Resource Planning systems for a ‘single system’, organizations have

found it difficult if not impossible to develop and deploy coherent master data

management strategies that ensure any item of data is found only once in the

enterprise computing architecture.

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New data mashup solutions for the multi-threaded multi-sourcing of data from

vendors including TIBCO, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Jack-Be, Boomi and Encanvas

mean that organizations today can provide their Information Workers with tools to

leverage data assets no-matter where they are or what file format they are in,

provided they have appropriate data access permissions.

Situational Applications

Since the emergence of office computing a quality gap has existed between the

tools that data processing professionals use and those that ‘workers’ use.

Office software like Microsoft® Excel™ (spreadsheets), Microsoft® PowerPoint™

(presentations), Microsoft® Word™ (word processor documents) and Microsoft®

Access™ (database) have become the ‘systems of last resort’ for Information

Workers that are afforded limited access to better-fit tools. Use of office desktop

tools forms ‘shadow systems’ that IT leaders often have little or no knowledge of.

IT teams today are faced with growing lists of demands from information workers

for applications that combine disparate combinations of information assets to

create applications that respond to new business situations and mobility.

This growing list for new applications is being described as the ‘long-tail’ of

software applications (i.e. a small number of individuals and small groups of users

who need to use large numbers of applications as opposed to the majority of users

who only require a small number of applications).

An effective way of serving this demand is to provide Information Workers with

the self-service tools they need to create database-driven business applications

using a combination of serviced applications, pre-shaped application sub-

assemblies (sometimes called ‘widgets’) and mashup applications that employ

code-free drag-and-drop, point-and-click or wizard-based authoring tools to

enable the on-demand authoring and deployment of professional applications.

These capabilities are essential features of a Social Operating System.

The Pathway to Enterprise Information Worker Productivity

Along with advances in the application of enterprise computing and cloud-based

social collaboration, attitudes towards the role, design, resourcing and governance

of organizations is set to change over the next decade. This section explores in

more detail the process of change from the present day culture of officer worker

environments to a future wanted state of a productivity-enabled information

working ecosystem.

I summarise the pathway to a fifty-fold increase in Information Worker Productivity

in 10 steps to set a priority to activities that must happen in order to achieve this

outcome, although the starting point for some organizations will be different

based on their present circumstances.

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1. Reset the DNA

Give the organization a new persona. Start a day-one change of

organizational identity that acknowledges the role of brand, teams,

communities, industry value chains, economic pathways, ability to change,

Re-visit the suitability of command and control.

This must happen first because it underpins all of the initiatives that follow.

2. Establish and communicate a vision and strategy.

Set a compelling vision. It is important to engage with stakeholders

throughout this process to ensure their aspirations are also considered

and they feel included in the exercise. Failure to do so will result in

resistance to change later.

3. Adopt Customer Value Management principles.

Aim to satisfy customer value better than competitors and be first to

market. Competitive advantage will come from customer value creation

through the application of new ideas.

4. Install an Enterprise Action Framework.

Measure the value of Information Worker contributions made against

stakeholder outcomes.

5. Employ the right skills at the right time.

It is unrealistic to believe that organizations will continue to seek to ‘own’

their staffing resources through full-time employment contracts. The

social web will increase the ability of organizations to implement on-

demand human resourcing for projects. A tipping point will occur in the

next decade when it becomes economically unviable to employ staffing

resources and the majority of projects will be fulfilled by expert contracted

workers. The challenge for economies will be to develop mechanisms to

ensure this new resourcing approach maintains standards of IP protection,

business continuity, governance and productivity performance.

6. Equip workers with applications that are fit for purpose.

Workers will expect to gain access to information acquisition, aggregation,

analysis and communications tools that suit their job role and persona.

They will expect to access content that is event-driven, fine grained and

contextualised to their needs.

7. Create a socially-oriented operating systems environment that aids

empowerment, community development, and that leverages skills

and social networks.

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Workers will demand the intuitive, personalizable and self-served Social

Operating System tools similar in style and operation to tools they use at

home.

8. Provision a learning and knowledge framework that aligns learning

programmes to outcomes, recognises the value of on-the-job

knowledge and skills development and that focuses on learning

outcomes rather than learning content.

Learning and education is becoming a life-long, self-help activity. But

organizations will continue to need to invest in learning to develop their

human resources. A higher proportion of learning investments will be

through social and charitable investments but even these will be measured

by the level of contribution they produce to desired strategic outcomes.

9. Drive results through systematic management methods including the

adoption of tacit productivity measurement techniques.

Organizations with smaller, more expert management teams will rely on

systematic management methods and tacit productivity measurement

techniques to ensure project teams achieve their goals.

10. Install and maintain a single view of the organization

Through all of these activities, organizations will need to work much

harder at maintaining their ‘organizational essence’ articulated through

their brand values and behaviours. A key operational characteristic of

excellent organizations lie in their ability to manage a single view of data,

processes, projects and outcomes. Understanding ‘what the organization

excels at’ and focusing on this activity and market positioning will be key

to survival in a digital global economy where ‘love marks’ will dominate.

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Conclusion

Chief Financial Officers have the opportunity lead their organizations

in the pursuit of a step-change in Information Worker Productivity

through modern management thinking and the deployment of

Enterprise Productivity Management tools.

Information Worker Productivity can achieve the fifty-fold increase that Peter

Drucker envisioned but no IT Silver bullet solution exists, or will ever exist, to make

it happen. The starting point, as with all successful transformations in the way

organizations work, is to acknowledge that culture change – leadership, vision,

behaviours, passion – always must lead the change agenda but that tooling change

must follow.

A step change in productivity will happen this decade but only for those

organizations that:

Re-invent their persona, design and levels of agility.

Acknowledge the role IWP plays as an enabler to profitability and

competitive advantage through stakeholder value creation.

Measure IWP in a more appropriate way.

Re-invent the tooling used by Information Workers.

Implement management frameworks that cement these changes.

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Glossary and References

Glossary

Action Framework – The idea that organizations should adopt a method of

managing the relationship between day-to-day Information Worker actions and

organizational outcomes to reliably enable the measurement of Information

Worker contributions.

Balanced Scorecard – The idea that organizations should adopt a model of

business performance evaluation that balances measures of performance by the

four perspectives of: (1) financial performance, (2) what matters to customers, (3)

internal processes and (4) innovation – to balance their score card – instead of only

thinking about financial returns.

Economic Pathway - The idea that organizations must work together to generate

customer value by making contributions to processes that cut across industries or

(at least) communities of organizations.

Golden Threads – The idea that organizations should agree on an assembly of

strategic management initiatives that will deliver long-term stakeholder outcomes

and therefore provide clarity of purpose to the reasons why actions are fulfilled if

not for the achievement of short-term goals. A mechanism to ensure that strategic

plans of an organization are not motivated by the short-term gain of executives.

Open Book Management - The idea that organizations are most effective if their

accounts are left open for all their employees to see as and when they wish, at the

same time as the employees are taught to understand better the full financial

picture.

Six Sigma – An approach to process review and redesign that seeks to improve

the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects

(errors) and minimising variability in manufacturing and business processes.

Triple Bottom Line – The idea that organizations should measure not just one

bottom line (i.e. Profitability), but three. The triple bottom line (TBL) consists of

three Ps: profit, people and planet. It aims to measure the financial, social and

environmental performance of the corporation over a period of time. It is argued

that only a company that produces a TBL is taking account of the full cost involved

in doing business.

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References

1. ‘Australia’s Productivity Challenge’ - GRATTAN Institute – 2011.

2. ‘Wastage adds up despite motivated workers’ - The Ernst & Young

Australian Productivity Pulse report, Edition One – October 2011

3. ‘Innovation and Raising Australia's Productivity Growth’ - The

Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research’s submission to the

House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics Inquiry into

Raising the Level of Productivity Growth in the Australian Economy -

September 2009.

4. ‘The Baseline 500: A Special Honor’ - Baseline Magazine, October 15,

2006 By John McCormick - The Baseline 500 is a ranking of companies with

the highest Information Productivity (IP) rating as authored by Baseline

Magazine. "The Baseline 500 IP ranking is a unique contribution to the

understanding of how transaction costs—people plus computers—create

business value-added," says Paul Strassmann. A former top information-

technology executive at Xerox, Kraft, NASA and the Department of Defense,

Strassmann +

5. 6created the Information Value-Added and Information Productivity metrics.

6. ‘Cloud Coffee House’ (book) – Ian Tomlin, 2009 – describes how social

networking in the clouds will reinvent how people communicate and how

business works.

7. ‘Review of the Rollout of the National Broadband Network First Report

by the Joint Committee on the National Broadband Network’ – 31st

August 2011.

8. ‘Managers Say the Majority of Information Obtained for Their Work Is

Useless’ - Accenture Information Management (AIM) press article– Jan 4,

2007.

9. ‘Agilization’ (book) - Ian Tomlin with Nick Lawrie, 2008 – describes a formula

for organizational design and behaviour to enable organizations to

consistently find a match between their capabilities and emerging

opportunities to deliver customer value.

10. ‘The Economist, A Special Report’ - October 7-13, 2006 - “The Search for

Talent: Why it’s Getting Harder to Find”.

11. ‘Corporate social responsibility is more important than salary when

choosing a job’ - Personnel Today article on BT survey into young

professional attitudes towards corporate social responsibility -24th March

2009.

12. ‘The Guru Guide’ - Joseph Boyett & Jimmie Boyett - 1998.

13. ‘Report from Event Survey’ - The eLearning Network, 2010. The eLearning

Network (eLN) is a non-profit, Community Interest Company run by the

eLearning community for the eLearning community. It is the number one

source for guidance on best practice and future trends in technology-based

learning at work, with nearly 3000 members in the UK and beyond.

14. ‘Social Operating Systems’ (book) - Ian Tomlin, 2008 – A guide to the

emerging world of digital Social Operating Systems, an Internet delivered

technology platform that supports the systematic management and

facilitation of human social relationships and interactions

15. ‘Lovemarks’ (book) – the future beyond brands’ - Kevin Roberts, then CEO

Worldwide for Saatchi & Saatchi – 2004.

32 © 2012 NDMC Ltd


Contact information

About the Author

Previously holding a series of Sales and Marketing Management and Directorship

positions in the European IT industry, in 2002 Ian Tomlin co-founded the

International Management Consultancy NDMC Ltd whose portfolio of clients

includes some of the world’s largest public and private sector organizations.

With Nick Lawrie he co-authored ‘Agilization’, a guide to regenerating

competitiveness for Western World companies. Ian Tomlin has authored several

other business books and hundreds of articles on business strategy, IT and

organizational design including ‘Cloud Coffee House’, a guide to the impact of

cloud social networking on business and ‘Social Operating Systems’, an exploration

into the next generation of enterprise computing platform.

About NDMC Ltd

NDMC is a management consultancy that specializes in helping organizations to

establish stretch strategies and build organizations with the means to become

serial stretchers. We help organizations to create customer value and engineer a

step-change in performance using a blend of methods and tools that create agility

in operational capabilities. For further information please visit www.ndmc.uk.com.

NDMC Ltd

(Americas) +1 201 777 3398

(Europe) +44 1865 596151

All information of whatever kind and which is contained in this documentation shall be called for the

purposes of this project ‘Confidential Information’ and remains the property of NDMC Ltd. All

trademarks and trade names used within this document are acknowledged as belonging to their

respective owners.

CFO Briefing: Information Worker Productivity

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