Industry leaders, academics focus on productivity

The Information Work Productivity Council, created nearly two years ago by industry leaders including Microsoft, Cisco, HP and Intel, is holding its first Information Work Forum next week in New York in an effort to reach out to businesses wrestling with the best ways to step up productivity.

The invitation-only event is the first sponsored by the council that is focused on creating a framework for businesses to measure productivity stemming from information-centric technology such as e-mail, instant messaging, team workspaces, video conferencing and Web conferencing.

“It’s all about trying to understand what is the business value of information work in the information age,” says Craig Samuel chief knowledge officer, HP Services. “Today, information is important and IT is critical. But what is the value being generated? It’s very hard to measure. … We want to help companies find a way that they can build a business case for these types of projects like they would for any financial investment decision where ROI is compelling.”

To that end, the Information Work Productivity Council is in the process of developing a set of metrics and industry benchmarks to enable companies to link business processes with the technology and services they use to connect increasingly dispersed workforces.
The daylong forum will bring together members of the IWPC, leaders in government and academia, as well as CIOs and CEOs to talk about the evolution of information work and how it is changing the way companies do business.

Presentations will include vertical industry-specific strategies, as well as broader-based discussions about how information-focused technology is being used within companies. Samuel, for example, will talk about the use of collaboration technology to jumpstart business.

HP uses Microsoft’s SharePoint Portal Server to connect employees, as well as peer-to-peer collaboration technology from Groove Networks. HP monitors the use of this technology, determining how many people are using the tools, where and how they’re using them and when and why they’re not being used, for example.

“That gives us a rudimentary number to measure the collaborative health of our organization,” Samuel says. “The more people that collaborate the better it is. The idea is to break down barriers and create openness. We report that to our management team around the world and it’s in their business goals every month. Ten percent of our business metrics are now related to this type of measurement.”

John Seely Brown, author and former Chief Scientist and Palo Alto Research Center Director (PARC), Xerox, will also talk about the changing corporate IT infrastructure and how flexible, services-oriented architectures are allowing for more collaboration and, as a result, more innovation.

“The IT systems we use, the ERP systems we use, have created almost a prison for us and we cannot move very freely in that prison so any kind of innovation we want to rapidly deploy has to be squeezed into what our current IT systems and the business processes they support allow us to do,” he says. “What’s happening now is slowly but surely as an extension of Web Services we’re starting to build service oriented architectures… that enable us to build more loosely coupled systems. … It enables us to innovate in ways we never could before.”