As your company is settling in to the
new year, you should ask yourself
one question: If you measure productivity by the amount of customer-focused work being produced by individuals, does your IT department help
accomplish that?
With rapidly evolving technologies and
seemingly endless considerations about
compatibility and upgrades, the technology-to-productivity curve is low, according
to Fred Pratt, CEO of DYONYX.
“Productivity is much more than having
sophisticated tools,” Pratt says. “To
understand and measure productivity,
business must return to the basics.
Remember what your company’s goals
are and then define how each business
unit supports those goals.”
Smart Business spoke with Pratt about
productivity, IT’s role in it and how to get
all aspects of your business on the same
page.
How should a business look at productivity?
Productivity is not just about how much
has been manufactured and how much it
sold for; it is about each and every component that makes up the process of producing a deliverable for the customer.
Productivity is best defined as ROE,
return on effort.
Productivity has many small and often
unnoticed components that cause a ripple effect up and down the line.
Productivity includes how well you recognize what triggers a customer to order,
why customers ordered from you instead
of the competition, and whether or not
they will order from you again.
Productivity is about what products are
being created to support the customer
requirements and whether or not the
profit margins are where they need to be
to remain competitive. Productivity is
also about how all of the costs of doing
business can be properly accounted for.
Finally, productivity is those intangible
elements of being able to determine if
you are really providing a value to the
customer. This will ultimately determine
your corporation’s position in the market.
Does enhanced technology equal enhanced
productivity?
Based on raw horsepower, desktop
computing should have a higher productivity rate than ever before. Desktop computing capability far exceeds the mainframe capacity in many large companies
from just a few years ago. The average
desktop user can now produce multimedia presentations for customers, merge
several different types of documents into
one and access data from all over the
world, data they could never access
before. So if productivity relates directly
to the horsepower available to a user, we
should be much more efficient than
before.
Are companies more efficient than ever
before?
The productivity figures gathered from
GNP numbers for the past few years
show nearly a flat-line average with some
spikes and dips, yet technology has
grown at an almost ballistic rate. Is there
a separation occurring from technology
and productivity? The situation is a paradox: If you do not have time to explore
the technology, you cannot fully understand the capabilities of it and increase
your productivity. Yet, if users are exploring the technology, then they are not completing their daily job functions and are
not as productive.
Since a separation is being created
because of technology outrunning users’
ability to utilize it, the separation will widen with the accelerated rate of new technology development. New training techniques are coming into the market that
will shorten the productivity curve time;
however, technology being available and
technology being deployed into practical
use are two different things. Often, by the
time a business is ready to use a technology, the tools are already outdated.
How can IT help bridge the gap?
IT groups are frustrated and cannot
understand the unreasonableness of the
users. Users say IT groups do not provide
them with what they need to do the job.
As a result of not meeting the user
groups’ needs, the business units will
begin to seek their own solutions. Then
business units are buying or designing
technology without IT support, which
makes for conflict.
If IT could fully understand the problem
and develop a solution that includes the
business unit, it would get more cooperation from business. This means that IT
must close the gap between technology
and a user’s production level, which is not
easy since you have technical people trying to teach business people how to use
the desktop tools. The business unit
wants to be able to do its job better; the
IT wants to get a technology installed and
move on to the next problem.
Technology is often installed by IT because it is the latest revision, not because
it solves a business problem. The first
objective of IT should be to increase productivity with the tools that exist; just saying that the tools exist without them being
used does not help the corporation.
FRED PRATT is the CEO of DYONYX. Reach him at (713) 293-6305 or [email protected].
