Productivity improvements were had in the 80’s and 90’s primarily on the shop floor, sales processes, and accounting areas. The principle drivers for this were enterprise systems that connected end-to-end’ transactions, eliminated (or at least reduced) redundant data, and allowed access to more transactional data by more people with a need to know.
SCM, CRM, and ERP implementations have been fairly well stabilized across many industries and incremental improvements in those arenas are demonstrating diminishing rates of return. This could be an explanation for the flat or declining productivity of late cited in Business 2.0:
…productivity -- a measure of the amount of work done by each employee -- actually declined in the last quarter of 2005 and is expected to post its worst showing in almost a decade this year.
Strip away the economic wonkery, and the upshot is clear: Bosses can't squeeze more work out of existing workers, and there aren't many new workers, particularly skilled ones, out there.
I mentioned this in a previous post, but I feel it is worth focusing on. Anyone involved in corporate projects, tasks, and workflows will agree that most business activity revolves not around the production and sale of products and services but around all the exceptions that occur outside of the supply chain (SCM), sales process (CRM), and accounting of transactions (ERP).
Look around the average corporate department and functional area and you realize that everything is an exception and there is no infrastructure to facilitate more timely resolution of those non-transactional activities - negotiations, proposals, research, issues, changes, audits, compliance, projects, etc, etc, etc. It is all desktop document and email-based communications.
The corporate arena has not seen a real improvement in productivity over the last 10-15 years – frankly, since the PC became established in the corporate environment. The advent of desktop apps and email was a huge productivity gain for the time, but nothing has changed in the interim. Sure, efforts with Lotus Notes and other CMS solutions offered the promise of continued productivity gains, but that neither happened nor has it ever been measured – at least not to my knowledge.
The reason for this is the data and transaction-centric nature of enterprise systems. Assuming things go according to plan, enterprise data processing is a seamless, painless act as simple as breathing. It is the exceptions, however, that cause the pain of collaboration for which there are still no solutions other than email, desktop apps, and klugy CMS installations.
Any company looking to make a serious leap in productivity gains in the corporate environment has no other choice than taking a serious, proactive effort at promoting the use of wikis in those environments.
That is if those companies really do want more action, better quality, and faster results.
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