Where should we focus our energies to drive benefits from IT?
I’ve just been analysing the findings from our survey of managers and knowledge workers. The 42 respondents provided a broad perspective from UK, Germany and the Carribean (MBA students – typically in middle and senior management positions).
Participants in our survey use Microsoft Office for around 20 hours a week and email for another 10-20 hours. They have had no formal training and have learnt what they know by trial and error. They get little or no support from their IT function except to fix specific faults.
Are they making the most effective use of the software to work productively? Who knows – but probably not. When I’ve demonstrated a few valuable features for the work they do (Styles, Document map, SmartArt) less than 50 % use them. We also know that there can be big differences in productivity – just take the well established 10:1 difference in the productivity of software developers and teams as an example.
It seems to me that there is a clear opportunity to do better than this. We will be exploring some of the issues at our workshop on the 17th Sept and I’ll be starting to outline some of the ideas we’re working on for improving the productivity of knowledge workers including managers.