Introduction
Information Productivity is an informal term that refers to
how efficient we are at organising and storing our information, emails, documents
and in fact any content that relates to our work and processes around our work.
Many organisations have systems and formalised processes for these kind of
activities, but they usually cater for the storing of information in its
traditional forms of documents and some very linear processes, while not
offering much in the way of how we share and collaborate in real life.
Sharing
This is by far the most common task that we need to perform
with our organisation's information, and not all of it is easily catered for.
Depending on your industry you could need to share with co-workers, suppliers,
clients and sometimes the public and that is not so easily done. Email tends to
be what most of us rely on for sharing, but it comes with many disadvantages,
namely size restrictions on mailboxes, aggressive spam filters, receipt
confirmation, missed emails and the worst of all... 'email time'. Coming back
to your desk to countless emails is not something anyone looks forward to
doing. Systems to allow the secure sharing of files will greatly increase
productivity levels over a period of time, these range from the relatively
simple to far more complicated and expensive alternatives. Bottom line is it
should be very easy to securely share and collaborate on information without
using email.
Collaboration
Sharing might be the most common task, but collaborating is
the clear winner on taking the most time. The process of sending information to
1 or more recipients (see sharing), getting their feedback and then sifting
through that feedback, giving feedback on the feedback, incorporating the
appropriate feedback and then having every recipient eventually agree to the
final form of the information accounts for an enormous amount of time. It
doesn't end there, how painful is it then when months later one of the parties
wants to question a specific point? How do you find who said what, when and
why? For many individuals that accounts for a large part of their day to day
responsibilities. There are not many systems that cater for this, but as a bare
minimum multiple comments from multiple parties needs to be supported, along
with an easy way to compare the comments/changes, accept certain changes and
approve final 'versions'. Structured workflows are also not the answer for
every eventuality, they might be ideal for some tasks e.g. processing of an
invoice, but for day-to-day collaboration a far more fluid system is required.
Summary
There are some systems out there that facilitate sharing and
collaborating, Synetec have their own, but the purpose of this article is not try
and promote a particular system, merely to share what some key areas are that if focused on could
improve productivity. After all, who wants to spend their life reading emails?
George Toursoulopoulos is a technology
specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of
bespoke software solutions.
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