CFO Briefing: Information Worker Productivity

WHITE PAPER
CFO BRIEFING: INFORMATION
WORKER PRODUCTIVITY
IAN TOMLIN

APRIL 2012

www.ndmc.uk.com

WHITE PAPER | CFO Briefing: Information Worker Productivity

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 2


Contents

Contents .............................................................................................................................................. 3
Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 4
What is an Information Worker and why do Economies Care? ..................................... 5
What is Productivity? ...................................................................................................................... 5
Inhibitors to Information Worker Productivity (IWP) ......................................................... 6
Organizational Effectiveness ....................................................................................................... 7
Worker Empowerment and Job Skills ................................................................................... 10
Tapping into Resources beyond the Firewall of the Enterprise .................................. 12
Communities and Communications ...................................................................................... 13
Inflexible and Poor Quality Information Technology ..................................................... 14
Red Tape and Sub-Optimal Process Design ...................................................................... 16
Re-Qualifying what it is to be a Productive Information Worker .............................. 17
Definition .......................................................................................................................................... 17
Customer Value Creation – The Productivity and Profitability Link .......................... 18
Re-Designing the Organization for Step Change Productivity ................................... 18
An Organization Equipped to Embrace Change .............................................................. 18
Alignment of Actions to Outcomes ....................................................................................... 19
Impact of Economic Pathways ................................................................................................. 20
Systematic Management ........................................................................................................... 20
Redesigning Enterprise Systems for Step Change Productivity ................................. 21
Customer Value Management (CVM) ................................................................................... 21
Action Framework ......................................................................................................................... 21
Learning and Knowledge Framework ................................................................................... 22
Socially Oriented Architecture (Re-defining ‘SOA’) ......................................................... 22
The Pathway to Enterprise Information Worker Productivity ...................................... 26
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 29
Glossary and References ............................................................................................................ 30
Glossary............................................................................................................................................. 30
References ....................................................................................................................................... 31
Contact information ..................................................................................................................... 32
About the Author .......................................................................................................................... 32
About NDMC Ltd .......................................................................................................................... 32

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 3


Chief Financial Officers should care about Information Worker
Productivity because it represents a key area of sub-optimal
performance in organizations today and is set to be a rich source of
competitive advantage tomorrow. The pathway to achieving
substantially higher information worker productivity can only be
achieved by tackling the inhibiting factors that exist within the office
environment today. It calls for a rethink in many areas;
organizational role, design, management behaviours, computing
systems and a re-evaluation of the role humans play in the fulfilment
of business processes.

Introduction

Peter Drucker, arguably the founding father of present day management
consulting wrote - “The most important achievement of the 20th century was a 50-
fold increase in the productivity of the manual worker. The most important
contribution of management in the 21st century will be to increase the productivity
of the knowledge worker by a similar amount…and that this is the biggest
challenge of developing countries and will become their only possible source of
competitive advantage. On this rests the prosperity of the Western World and the
future of its developed economies.”

Much has been learnt about what makes information workers less productive
thanks to a myriad of knowledge management, change management and business
process improvement experiences. This paper draws on that learning.

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What is an Information Worker and why do Economies Care?

The term Knowledge Worker was first coined by Peter Drucker in 1959, as ‘one who
works primarily with information or one who develops and uses knowledge in the
workplace.’ The term Information Worker has entered the modern vernacular of
business more recently and describes an individual whose economic value is
measured in part by their production or use of information.

It is now broadly accepted that the economic consequences of failing to increase
the productivity of information workers is much greater than was first thought
when the perception of knowledge workers was scoped down to only roles
associated with the development of knowledge. Most employment roles in a 21st
century economy demand some use of computers and information aggregation,
analysis or dissemination. As such, the number of information workers as a
proportion of workforce for any economy is substantially greater than the number
of roles whose main capital is knowledge; roles that might be found in sectors such
as education, research, healthcare, sciences, marketing, media, journalism, creative
arts and information and communications technology.

What is Productivity?

1
The Grattan Institute describes ‘Productivity’ simply as: ‘what you get out for what
you put in’. The Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and
Research adopt a more precise definition, describing productivity as ‘a measure of
the rate at which units of output of goods and services are produced per unit of
input (for example labour, capital and raw materials).’

Traditional measurements of Information Worker Productivity have focused on
effort or number transactions produced in any given time period but this paper
argues a more effective measure is the level of improvement to contributions made
by individuals towards organizational outcomes (i.e. as valued by the stakeholders
of the enterprise – shareholders, customers, employees, partners, communities
where the organization operates etc.) balanced against the level of investment
made over time.

Few organizations adopt such measures today.

How organizations articulate their performance outcomes can vary and this makes
comparison difficult. Some of the more common mechanisms include a balanced
scorecard of objectives, by listing golden threads of sustainability or by adopting
triple bottom line (‘TBL’) measures. For more information about these
management systems, please visit the glossary.

4
In the United States, attempts have been made to measure the contribution of
Information Technology investments by qualifying Information Productivity, or IP,
which is profit left after subtracting the cost of capital invested by shareholders,
divided by a company's costs—selling, general and administrative expenses. But
this narrow approach to productivity measurement resulting from ‘IT investment’
ignores the potential multiplier contributions that better tools bring to working
practises and the value they produce.

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The management truism, ‘If you don’t measure it, you can’t manage it’ applies to
productivity to. While organizations continue to ignore the need to measure
Information Worker Productivity correctly, they are unlikely to achieve the step-
change improvements they seek.

Inhibitors to Information Worker Productivity (IWP)

Today’s Information Workers are assessed for their productivity effectiveness
against a ‘what is deemed reasonable’ backdrop based on existing methods and
technologies. These methods and tools support and encourage norms of
behaviour that are taken to be ‘the best option available’ due partly to a lack of
willingness to innovate and also through the powerful influence of leading
software companies like Microsoft® and Adobe® that have come to dictate
perceptions of what good looks like and the pace of office technology evolution.

A business analyst tasked with making an assessment of costs for a business line or
process would not be chastised for (1) emailing the various interested parties to
engage them in the process, (2) export data from the source business systems, (3)
create an Excel spreadsheet to make sense of the data, (4) produce a PowerPoint
presentation to present findings to managers and (5) present the findings in a 2-
hour meeting. While all of these tasks are today deemed acceptable operating
methods and justified to fulfil the request, there are irrefutable inefficiencies in
each stage of this process.

There may also be associated ‘hidden’ areas of productivity wastage such as (1) the
reasons for this work might not have been justified, (2) perhaps the analysis already
existed in a different part of the business, or (3) perhaps the drivers for the activity
changed and notification of this fact was not passed down the line to the analyst
and so all of this work might be for no result.

While this example suggests a tiny chard of the sort of operating behaviours that
happen in every office today, it does provide an indicative example of the
Information Worker Productivity gap that exists between ‘what is deemed
reasonable today’ and what can be achieved.

In a document titled ‘Wastage adds up despite motivated workers’ that reports on
a survey of almost 2,500 workers, across various industries, regions and from all
levels within organizations in both the private and public sector, Ernst and Young
puts forward four areas where Australian organizations are most likely to find
inhibitors to productivity, namely:

1. Organization structure, design and operating model — Removing all
wasteful, bureaucratic, and non-value work and outputs
2. Technology — Being more ambitious and effective in process automation
and technological change
3. People management issues — Developing and utilising the full talents
and capabilities of human capital

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4. Innovation - Being deliberate and audacious with an innovation agenda

In rating the influences on individual productivity across these four specific areas,
over half of respondents (54%) say people management issues have the biggest
impact. Around 1 in 4 (23%) see organization structure, design and operating
model as a key influence, while others cite innovation (15%) and technology (8%).

This report (referred to hereafter as the ‘Pulse Report’) is a useful perspective on
the present real-world state of the ‘typical information worker environment’ and
the size of the challenge facing organizations seeking to improve the productivity
of their information workers.

The remainder of this section is dedicated to the contributory factors that
encourage the sub-optimal status quo in Information Worker Productivity that
exists in most organizations today.

Organizational Effectiveness

The effectiveness of organizational design and management remains poor in a
wide number of public and private sector organizations. These aspects of sub-
8
optimal organizational design described in the book Agilization. Below I
summarise the key issue areas and their impact on IWP.

Management Style, Culture and Brand Love

We live in an increasingly brand conscious and brand-aware world. The more
commerce moves to digital platforms, the closer consumers want to get to the
brands they trust. Brand has no value if not in the eyes of customers – and when
customers do see value in a brand, it is the customers that become the owners of
the brand, not the organization. In 2004, Kevin Roberts, then CEO Worldwide for
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Saatchi & Saatchi wrote, ‘The Idealism of Love is the new Realism of business. By
building Respect and inspiring Love, business can move the world.’ When Apple®
launches its newest gadget these days, it’s their customers that produce the
product videos, explain the benefits and why it’s so cool!

The values that customers see in a brand become the essence of an organization
and define the way it needs to think and act. In this paradigm, the organization
becomes an empty vessel that can be ‘anything it needs to be’. This concept of the
organization is a departure from the notion that an organization is ‘an office
building, a set or contracts and policies or some form of ‘people owner’.
st
21 century organizations must stand for core values that stakeholders want to be
associated with. The organization is no longer a legal entity, a series of contracts
and policies or a collection of mechanised business processes that produces
‘widgets’, it is the embodiment of a set of values, attitudes, behaviours and
outcomes that people choose to be associated with.

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10
A survey conducted by communications group BT of 120 young professionals in
the UK found that more than one-third thought working for a caring and
responsible employer was more important than the salary they earned.

*This traditional top-down
Organizations that adopt a *command and control management style originating
‘command and control’ method of from the last century of mechanisation are finding workforce productivity levels
organizational management style
is often paralleled to the way an
progressively falling. This is because workers too want to join a brand journey with
orchestra works with defined roles, people who share their values; they don’t want to be owned or told what to do
pre-scripted musical scores and a
conductor….
without first knowing why.

Adding to pressures for change in the employer-employee relationship is the fact
that young people of Generation-Y now joining the workforce repel the idea of a
job for life. For Gen-Y, life is too short to commit it to a soul-less organization.
Those armed with appropriate skills know those skills are in high demand as the
baby boomer generation approaches retirement. In this war for talent, businesses
that have modern perspectives on the role and function of the organization – such
as a strong brand story, adopt an ethical ethos, satisfy employee demands for the
right working conditions, offer a ‘coffee house’ styled environment and work-time
flexibility - are winning the higher calibre of staff.
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Research by The Economist in 2006 found that the median tenure for workers ages
55-64 in the United States was 9.3 years. For workers in the 25-43 age group, the
median tenure was 2.9 years.

For organizations that have employed a command and control management style
for many years, and where departmental silos have evolved around the self-
*This modernist management
style based on strong brand values interest of senior managers, installing a *modern management style that is
and self-empowerment is
characterised by a flat management team structure, project-based activity
sometimes paralleled with a Jazz
band where there is no specified planning, embracing employee empowerment and flexible working, with a strong
leader, roles are defined but less
social orientation is to say the least difficult.
tightly scoped and the tune is
broadly understood but does not
Information Worker Productivity revolves around the reality that human beings are
constrain the creative versatility of
the individual. not machines; they have a soul and will produce more when energized by rewards
or impassioned by core values and the feeling they’re contribution is making a
difference to something they believe in.

 Organizations that insist on a ‘stick and no carrot’ approach to management,
imagine themselves to live in an era when employees would ‘do what we tell them
to do’. The world has moved on. Employers that tell employees what to do, but
don’t explain why are unlikely to achieve the productivity gains they seek.

Vision and Leadership

Pulse Report Findings ’ Around 1-in-5 respondents (22%) say they
don’t have a clear vision of what is expected of them in their role, 41% do
not agree organizational effectiveness and efficiency had the right level of
focus and attention, while 39% of respondents do not think their
organization operates effectively.’

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Not all organizations have a meaningful vision that’s well articulated so that
employees, customers and other stakeholders can feel engaged by it. For those
organizations that do have a clearly stated vision, fewer still have implemented
strategies to achieve desired outcomes.

A Fortune® magazine study published in the 2000’s found that “Less than 10% of
strategies effectively formulated are executed”.

By definition, a leader is someone who has followers. It is incumbent on leaders to
create the empowering environment that causes employees and third party project
contributors to want to follow their direction (embracing the management
principle that a disengaged employees is likely to be less productive than one that
is). This starts with a compelling vision. According to John Case of Inc. Magazine,
‘a company performs best when its people see themselves as partners in the
business rather than as hired hands’. This sound common sense underpins the
concept of ‘open-book management’; that information received by employees
should not only help them do their jobs effectively, but help them understand how
the company is doing as a whole (Kidwell & Scherer, 2001).

 If an organization does not know (or cannot agree on) what it is trying to achieve,
it’s unlikely they ever will be successful. Organizations that display poor clarity of
purpose and lack leadership are unlikely to create the empowered workplace that
Generation-Y information workers will in future expect.

Organization Design

Few organizations review their departmental budgets against strategic plans in a
way that ensures budgeted activities are directly aligned to desired objectives.
Evidence from change management projects suggest that it’s common for over
one third of planned actions articulated in budget documents to have little or no
association with stated strategic outcomes.

Strategic planning methods like balanced scorecard help organizations to shape
their objectives and turn formulated strategy into action but practitioners often
miss out the vital step of validating strategic plans against existing budget plans.
In consequence, departmental managers can continue to discharge departmental
activities that make no significant impact on strategic outcomes – wasting
hundreds of man-hours each year.

Silos of Operation

Dr Eli Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints states that the core constraint of
organizations is that they are structured, measured and managed in parts, rather
than as a whole. This produces lower-than-expected productivity with constraints
constantly shifting from one place to another and chronic conflicts between
people representing different parts of the organization. In most organizations
founded in the 20th century, the problem of departmental silos pervades. Over

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time, organizations inadvertently encourage departments to be self-sufficient by
installing incentives that promote achievement of department outcomes over
organizational goals. They let departments form their own management structures,
information technology systems and operating procedures.

 Organizations that fail to align departmental budgets to strategic outcomes create
high time and money wastage. Information Workers might be passionate about
what they do and work very hard, but it might well be that their energy is being
spent on activities that have little or no direct impact on the ‘things the
organization cares about’.

 A key constraint to Information Worker Productivity is the existence of operating
silos and their impact on how activities are assigned, resourced and delivered.

Worker Empowerment and Job Skills

 When individuals do not feel engaged or empowered, they produce less. Factors
that impact on engagement include leadership quality, organizational design,
access to technology, the extent to which an individual feels their skills are being
developed and leveraged, and their job rewards and opportunities for career
advancement.

Organizational design shapes management attitudes towards how work teams
should function. Organizations that adopt a command and control management
philosophy will also seek to install very tight job definitions for their employees
that constrain the productivity of teams. People who are targeted to make very
specific contributions to a project will normally only deliver the minimum expected
of their role.
11
In 1949, Eric Trist of the Tavistock Institute for Social Research (the Tavvy) spent
his time at the Haighmoor seam in Durham analysing the team working behaviors
of coal miners. Trisk identified that when imposed team structures were adopted
(the conventional model), miners that were organized by managers would commit
only to their allocated task and would consequently only enter into a few very
limited social relationships sharply divided between those within his task group
and those outside. With ‘outsiders’ these task- constrained miners shared no sense
of belongingness and neither would they feel any responsibility to them for the
consequences of their actions. In contrast, work teams that organized themselves
would take ownership of the shared outcomes of the team, they would have more
relationships, deeper emotional ties and they would discharge more tasks. Of most
interest, workers operating within these informal work-team structures were more
productive than those who discharged specific tasks as part of the conventional
model.

Pulse Report Findings  A key relationship exists between age and
motivation levels given that respondents from the 65+ age bracket are the
most enthused, with 85% saying they are motivated to perform to their
highest capacity, which is a stark contrast to 53% from the 15—19 age
(Gen-Y) bracket.

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A growing gap is emerging between successive generations on attitudes towards
5
employers and employment that Ian Tomlin reports in his book Cloud Coffee
House. Workers of the mechanised age expected a job for life in return for their
life-time commitment to the success of an organization. In contrast, it’s not
considered ‘cool’ to be a part of Generation-Y and commit to a career with any
organization unless it is engaged in social activities, healthcare, science or charity!

Pulse Report Findings ’An overwhelming 71% state they are motivated
to do their job to the best of their ability yet only 62% say their skills are
strongly utilised by their employer, leaving a staggering 38% of workers
with skills that could potentially be used more productively in other areas.

Only in the last decade have social networking technologies existed to enable
Information Workers to profile their skills on workgroup systems giving colleagues
(and organizations) the means to realise the potential of the people they work
with. When an individual is recruited to fulfil the needs of a job role, rarely is the
full extent of their experience made visible to the organization that recruits them.
When appointed for a specific role, other related knowledge skills are discarded.
Individuals KNOW when their skills aren’t being fully utilised by a role and the
consequential impact on the individual is normally to (1) feel undervalued, or (2) to
seek alternative employment options. As organizations adapt their design to
embrace a more project-oriented approach to discharging activities, they have the
means to leverage more of the skills (and the knowledge and experience) that
exists within their people.

Pulse Report Findings  Forty-two per cent of respondents didn’t agree
they had the right training to apply the technology they have access to
effectively.’

 Information Workers that lack the essential tools to discharge their roles, or
possess the expertise to appreciate workarounds and better ways of working, will
be inherently less productive than counterparts equipped with the skills to tools to
perform their allocated roles.

There exists and accepted norm of behaviour within organizations to adopt ‘one-
size-fits-all’ shrink-wrapped software applications and, where no off-the-shelf
solution exists, to build bespoke applications using a variety of ad-hoc tools. The
resulting malaise of disjointed applications results in workers having to learn many
‘systems’ to discharge their roles combining new interfaces, analysis, reporting and
communications components. This creates and unsustainable training burden,
further exaggerated by increased workforce turnover.
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According to the eLearning Network, the key challenges facing learning
practitioners today are:

1. Effective learning

 The value of training interventions on training outcomes.

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 The challenges of moving training out of the class-room.

 The value of content re-use (and the means to achieve it).

 Making training relevant to all – how to support a blended approach
to course delivery that supports different training styles and modes.

2. Distributed learning

 Facilitating learning using web and mobile devices as a delivery and
engagement vehicle to reduce costs and share resources.

 Encourage the recycling of knowledge/content through social
networking and collaboration.

 Increasing knowledge creation through sharing, debate and practical
real-world experiences.

In addition to the above, the organizational challenges facing learning managers
includes (1) finding the resources and know-how to develop courses, (2) justifying
funds for investment and, (3) obtaining commitments from departmental
managers to release their staff for formal training.

Learning experts acknowledge that the majority of learning happens ‘on the-job’.
Today’s social networking tools have the potential to not just re-use but also grow
knowledge resources through day-to-day social interactions. Unfortunately, these
technologies have yet to gain critical mass, so their true contribution to on-the-job
learning remains unclear.

Tapping into Resources beyond the Firewall of the Enterprise

Many senior executives and departmental managers envision of their organization
as an isolated entity that exists ‘within the firewall’. People are qualified as being
either people with assigned permissions on the inside (employees), or everyone else
8
– contractors, customers, suppliers, shareholders etc. As I outline in Agilization,
the world of business today is far less black and white. Individuals and
organizations that interact with an organization on a day-to-day basis will often
retain valuable content, skills and insights that could be leveraged to reduce
operating costs and generate new customer value were it accessible. Surrounding
an organization by a moat and draw-bridge discourages these pockets of valuable
assets from being released.

A new century of business calls for new ways of thinking about how an
organization exists within its ecosystem of supply-chain links, channels to market,
social and community responsibilities, and industry. Few businesses today can
deliver their fullest customer value without contributions from third parties. The
notion that ALL of the resources and ALL of the data needed to fulfil business
process needs should be met by internal capabilities alone is at best naïve.

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 No longer is an organization able to see itself as a discrete entity. Organizations
that fail to embrace third party resources, know-how, content and social networks
(etc.) will have less productive workers as a consequence. In most industries,
organizations need to work in partnership with third party organizations and
communities to deliver optimal customer value. Participating and nurturing these
economic pathways demands that organizations SHARE and POOL resources. In
order to call on expert resources that exist outside of the enterprise, cultural,
technological and organizational design barriers must be overcome.

Communities and Communications

Pulse Report Findings  ’Only 58% is spent on work that directly adds
real value while 24% of the day spent on networking, personal
development and other organizational curricular activities.’

Organizations that fail to appreciate the connection between social networking and
productivity enablement view the periods workers spend on business social
networking sites as ‘time wasted’. A growing volume of evidence is forming that
evidences how social networking on cloud-based real-time platforms can offer a
step-change advantage to worker productivity IF it is appropriated harnessed.

These benefits come in the form of:

 Better ‘team’ productivity

 Breaking down silos of activity, silos of data and silos of skill that make
business processes inherently more costly to deliver and less effective

 Appreciation of, and access to, knowledge and skills ‘pools’

 Richer customer insights and greater opportunity for first mover
advantage through the delivery of fine-grained, contextualised and event-
driven intelligence

 Access to new opportunities through third party social connections

 Stronger brand affinity within an industry or market sector owing to an
organization’s reputation and credentials within key online communities

 Development of on-the-job know-how and skills

 Improved allocation of project resources

 Adoption of more efficient ways of communicating (less travel, fewer
meetings, less time overhead on individuals)

 Reduced administrative overheads (as key data – such as understanding
how people spend their time – is captured as part of the day job) and less
red-tape made possible by greater transparency and trust

 Less time spent on aggregating, re-purposing and sharing knowledge

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13
In his book Social Operating Systems Ian Tomlin interviews Rohit Banerji, senior
consultant and expert in asset performance in the Utilities sector. It examples the
opportunity presented by social networking approaches to impact on business
efficiencies. Rohit believes that the Utilities sector has seriously missed a trick by
not harnessing knowledge held in the heads and social networks of technicians
and engineers on the ground. Rohit explains, “’When it comes to social
collaboration, utilities still rely on ideas forums, suggestion schemes, knowledge
portals etc. – traditional approaches and models that have proven not to work in
the past but are nevertheless ‘corporately acceptable’. What utilities desperately
need is a way of capturing knowledge held at the local level as business as usual,
distilling it and then having the means to analyse and share it. This is because
the cost of reacting to an event that’s already happened can be 3 to 6 times more
than the cost of anticipating and preventing it.”
Something like 20 to 30% is held at management level - so the people that have
the data don’t need it, but the people that need it (senior managers) don’t have it.
“Utilities firms are forced to plan with poor data because conventional ways of
eliciting knowledge from people on ground (by way of direct communications
workshops and conversations) cannot be scaled up to cover the enormous
number of assets that these companies typically own. Over the last few years the
industry has spent millions of dollars on business intelligence systems that are
over-analysing poor quality data – a drive fuelled by regulators, who need data to
review the companies’ plans and an incumbent resistance to change from those
who perform the analysis.
Utilities companies have evolved coping strategies to live with poor data, of
which there are generally two. These are:
1. Modelling the behaviour of groups of similar assets and then generalising it
for individual assets. The problem with this approach is that it’s generally
been inaccurate to the point of being unusable for individual equipment i.e.,
the level at which decisions are made.
2. To shorten the decision cycle through real-time processes – the next best
thing to do if you cannot anticipate failure is to build capabilities to react
faster!”

Exploiting online communities holds the key to success for many organizations in
st
the 21 century. The power of social networks to unite groups with common
interests and common goals represents unprecedented opportunities for those
organizations with the brand credentials and know-how to energise third party
endorsements. Appreciating customer interests and passions of online
st
communities is a crucial component of the new 21 century business toolkit.

 The potential exists to achieve a transformation in Information Worker Productivity
through adoption of Social Office technologies and the new approaches to
addressing organizational outcomes it offers.

Inflexible and Poor Quality Information Technology

Pulse Report Findings ’While an overwhelming 71% of respondents
said they were motivated to do their job to the best of their ability, 39%
didn’t agree they had access to the right technology.’

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It seems incredible that with so much investment made into business software over
recent years that almost 1 in 2 workers lack essential technology to fulfil their role.
Nevertheless, the level of dissatisfaction associated with poor software applications
and office productivity tools appears still to be growing.
7
A report produced by IT consulting firm Accenture Information Management in
2007, following an online survey of more than 1,000 middle managers of large
companies in the United States and United Kingdom (the purpose of which was
to uncover wide-ranging insights about the way Information Workers gather, use
and analyse information), found that more than 50 per cent of the information
they obtain has no value to them.
More than half (57 percent) of respondents said that having to go to numerous
sources to compile information is a difficult aspect of managing information for
their jobs. In order to get information about competitors, customers, project
responsibility or another department, respondents said they have to go to three
different information sources, on average. In addition, 40 percent of respondents
said that other parts of the company are not willing to share information, and 36
percent said there is so much information available that it takes a long time to
actually find the right piece of data.

Current approaches to enterprise IT are stifling workforce productivity (these are
8
described in more detail in Agilization):

 Data silos created by use of discrete applications.

It’s thought that up to 60% of content in most businesses is held in back-
office systems and in most cases, information workers have to login to
more than six applications in order to access it. This creates huge user
frustration and poor knowledge worker productivity. It also means most
middle managers are starved of the insights they need to make
operational decisions.

 Use of documents as a mechanism for data aggregation and sharing.

Unstructured data (data held within emails, messages, documents and
Web page articles) is very difficult to re-use. According to empirical data
the average office document is read less than 5 times before it gets
discarded. People struggle to agree what content is valuable and how it
should be indexed for later use. This results in large volumes of content
rich data from being hidden away from ‘the organization’ in hard-drives
and files. Use of office documents is seen to be one of the biggest
inhibitors to IWP.

 Over-reliance on email as a method of collaboration.

Email is not an efficient communication method for Information Workers –
it consumes a large amount of time in personal administration, encourages
an asynchronous communications culture (sometimes used as a
mechanism to avoid engaging people in ‘live’ conversation) and worse still,
when people use email it’s difficult to measure the extent to which
communications are contributing to a process or represent a distraction.

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For a functional perspective, email is unsecure, manages content poorly
and encourages discussions to be fragmented. Alternatives to email are
emerging in the social office communications space and are set to create a
step-change when they finally achieve market acceptance.

 Poor tools to capture tacit intelligence

The information that passes between colleagues on a daily basis is
recognised by organizations as being valuable to develop better
understanding customer needs and issues, problem resolution etc. but
current systems of knowledge interchange - asynchronous email, back-
office systems that don’t integrate with one another or share data, over
reliance on office documents and ‘custom’ software solutions – are
acknowledged as being poor at capturing and exploiting this knowledge.
With incumbent office systems, huge gaps in knowledge exist, such as:
Who knows who (and what are the strength of ties)? Who does what? Who
contributes to which discussion? Who is best at solving problems? Who are
the go-to people in the organization? What happened last time this
problem occurred?

 Information workers experience content overload and lack effective tools
to access and use information in a way they want and need to.

 Workers are not equipped to exploit their ‘networks’ to achieve outcomes.

 Applications are a poor match to user needs  difficult to learn, often
poorly integrated, too expensive to adapt.

Pulse Report Findings  ‘Fifty—one per cent say that further innovation
would increase productivity, 49% acknowledge a clear and compelling case
for innovation and 51% acknowledge they have the opportunity to
suggest new ideas. In contrast, 44% did not agree their organization gives
innovation the right focus and attention, 59% did not agree innovation
was adequately recognised and rewarded and 48% did not agree good
ideas were implemented.’

Today’s information technology tools and approaches produce a sub-optimal

operating environment for Information Workers.

Red Tape and Sub-Optimal Process Design

Growth in the number of policies and procedures organizations must adhere to is a
common challenge to organizations in any territory. But the way organizations
install their policies can itself create a larger overhead. It’s not uncommon for
threads of policy – quality, risk, information security, health and safety,
environmental policy, diversity etc. – to be managed separately using document-
intensive systems. This makes governance and administration significantly more

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 16


time intensive; not just for administrators but for departments that must comply
with polices.

As organizations grow they develop departmental structures and these structures
develop or inherit business processes and tools to fulfil their role. But rarely do
departments ‘start again’ with a fresh piece of paper and revisit their processes
from a ‘use case value’ basis. This means bad practise becomes endemic and is
not contested because ‘it’s the way we’ve always done it’. Organizations that have
used process re-design methods such as Six Sigma to re-visit their processes often
start from assumptions that already exist in the organization such as ‘what matters
most to customers?’ and ‘how do we produce customer value?’ and whilst this can
help to do things better, it often misses the opportunity to do better things.

The British Management Consultant Sir John Harvey Jones wrote, ‘The basics of the
business must be as efficient as human beings can make them: they always
deteriorate over time unless somebody deliberately tightens them up. But nothing
is sacred. Organizations must be prepared to kill any aspect of their structure or
operating approach that gets in the way of its ultimate ambition.’

Few organizations have an agenda, or the empowered resources, to repeatedly
question why they do what they do, and seek to improve it.

Pulse Report Findings  ’20% say their organization needs to reduce
bureaucracy and red—tape. A further 16% say processes and systems need to
be simplified.’

 Policy adoption approaches that rely on discrete systems or documents to manage
compliance create abnormally high level of operational overheads that lead to a
reduction in Information Worker Productivity.

Re-Qualifying what it is to be a Productive Information Worker

This section sets the bar on areas of potential productivity improvement attained
through innovation in methods and tools.

Definition

st
A productive Information Worker in the 21 century is someone who contributes
more to stated organizational outcomes in less time.

This measure of IWP is a departure from assessments of productivity focused on
numbers of documents produced or numbers of transactions processed. To
MEASURE productivity in these redefined terms requires an understanding of what
the organizational outcomes are and an appreciation of the linkages between
worker ‘effort’ and the ‘contribution’ it produces to serve the outcome.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 17


Customer Value Creation – The Productivity and Profitability Link

Increases in IWP should generate more Customer Value. Generating higher levels
of customer value than alternatives is one of the simplest ways of measuring
competitive advantage. The globalisation of markets resulting from the growing
use of the Internet and mobile communications means that consumers of products
and services have more choices. To compete, organizations need to be better than
their rivals at identifying what matters most to customers and how to deliver it.

Jack C. Welch, former CEO of General Electric Company said, ‘An organization’s
ability to learn, and to transform that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate
competitive business advantage.’

Remarkably, many organizations have no integrated process for learning from
customers or applying what they’ve learnt. Much of the customer feedback that
‘hits’ an organization fails to reach decision makers organization empowered to act
on it and implement change.
st
 In the 21 century the contribution made by human beings to serve business
processes will be less about ‘machine operators’ and more about curiosity,
sourcing innovation, big ideas and the adaptation of processes to events. Sourcing
greater customer value (the ‘output’) from the efforts of Information Workers (the
‘input’) produces one of the more tangible links between productivity and
profitability.

Re-Designing the Organization for Step Change Productivity

This section describes the areas of organizational re-design that are needed create
the necessary environment for a step-change in Information Worker productivity.

An Organization Equipped to Embrace Change

Achieving a step change in Information Worker Productivity demands that workers
spend more time doing better things and this pre-supposes that processes can be
repeatedly and iteratively changed.

In Germany organizations have an organization department that combines all of
the skills necessary to manage change in a business – IT, HR, process change
experts, analysts etc. This has proven returns because it gives authority and
purpose to change agendas. Organizations like Audi Group have gone a step
further and align roles within their IT department to support key processes, so that
IT professionals are directly incentivised to contribute to process improvement
outcomes. This approach also means that individuals develop a richer appreciation
of how processes work and ‘care’ about the outcomes. Any ideas or suggestions
on how to improve processes are embraced by people who are motivated to
achieve improvements.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 18


When organizations seek to employ all roles through full-time employment
contracts, this creates a structural rigidity that inhibits fast reaction to market
changes. For example, in the 1990’s office equipment vendors suddenly found that
demand for facsimile devices was on the wane and yet software was a fast growing
area. This meant many Japanese manufacturers (that have a policy of staff
retention for life) were required to re-train thousands of hardware engineers to
become software and quality engineers. Similarly when a pharmaceuticals
company suddenly finds demand exists for one treatment at the detriment of
another, finding scientists with the new specialist skills needed to populate a lab
while having to re-train or terminate employment contracts can install inflexibilities
that cause organizations to be less competitive than smaller, specialist start-ups.

The answer to the challenge of workforce rigidity is to employ more staffing
resources on-demand to serve organizational needs as they emerge at any point in
time. The growth in social networking and online talent pools affords many
organizational disciplines this opportunity. But there are risks attached to this
strategy, namely that:

 Resources may not be available when needed.

 Intellectual property bleeds out.

 Causal employment might result in less emotional commitment to the
employer leading to greater truancy, staff churn, conflicts of interest etc.

Alignment of Actions to Outcomes

Achieving a step change in Information Worker Productivity demands that workers
spend more time fulfilling activities that contribute to strategic outcomes. The
Australian Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research signpost this
consideration as one of the most effective ways to boost productivity. In their
submission to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics
Inquiry into Raising the Level of Productivity Growth in the Australian Economy
(September 2009) they state, ‘increases in productivity can result from minimising
the use of inputs for a given output or maximising output for a given input.’

Organizations must find better ways of getting more value from the efforts made
by Information Workers. One of the best ways of doing this is to reduce the
amount of unnecessary tasks that happen in an organization. Drucker wrote,
‘There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at
all.’ Measuring Information Worker Productivity in terms of outcomes rather than
effort is arguably the single most important contributor to change.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 19


Impact of Economic Pathways

Economic collaboration across industries means organizations will discharge their
role as part of a process that delivers customer value but they do not own the
process. They become a cog – in a larger process. I call this an economic pathway
because normally there is a very obvious value chain that links each of the
contributing process steps to its outcome. The challenge that faces all parties is
that they must work together in an efficient and effective way to make sure their
economic pathway is better than alternatives.

Illustration of an Economic Pathway

This example of Industry Economic Pathways comes from the UK’s public sector in
the area of traffic management. Highways authorities across the UK are responsible
for managing road networks and they are encouraged by central government to
do this well. Working together with bordering authorities and road works
undertakers (such as utilities), organizations like Transport for London have been
able to dramatically reduce the number of times they dig up the roads (and
thereby create congestion). Central to TfL’s strategy has been the recognition that
their organizational goals cannot be achieved without the support of organizations
that share their economic pathway.

Appreciation by organizational leaders of both the existence and importance of
Economic Pathways to organizational success places demands for new kinds of IT
systems that can bring organizations (their people and their data) together on the
same page – and installs a new set of challenges for IT professionals. Two recent
innovations have made support of communities engaged in Economic Pathways
more practical. These are:

 Cloud Computing

 Social Operating Systems

Systematic Management

Many organizations rely on the instincts and experience of senior executives but
have few mechanisms to help leaders direct their business strategy in complex
environments, navigate through strategic uncertainty and effectively manage
change in organizations.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 20


Organizations need to share their plans and involve Information Workers in them if
they are to harvest their energy and ideas. This pre-supposes that plans cascade
through the organization to Information Workers that understand what is expected
of them. A surprisingly small proportion of organizations do this today.

Systematic Management is a term that describes a broad spectrum of formalised
management methods used to provide systems of management as an alternative to
intuition and gut feel. Without Systematic Management approaches, it’s hard to
imagine Information Workers fully appreciating how they can contribute to
projects and activities that span departments, sometimes industries without a
richer understanding of the strategic outcomes they are attempting to fulfil.

Redesigning Enterprise Systems for Step Change Productivity

In this section I profile the ‘systems’ that are required in order to facilitate effective
Information Worker Productivity.

Customer Value Management (CVM)

This is a system and process for managing how organizations acquire, interpret
and apply their customer insights. Whilst CVM systems can be developed using a
collection of tools, what matters most is that systems present:

 Clarity over different types of customers.

 A method for reliably capturing customer insights.

 A single view of the customer experience.

 A method of interpreting customer insights including the ability to align
feedback to parts of the organization that can benefit from it.

 The ability to turn customer insights into useful products and services.

Adopting a system for capturing and measuring customer value means that
Information Worker contributions oriented towards achieving customer value
outcomes can be measured, and any changes to customer value aspirations can be
quickly adopted in order to maintain alignment between (1) what matters to
customers, (2) what the organization plans to deliver and (3) the activities
Information Workers perform.

Action Framework

Responding to organizational needs to align Information Worker Actions to
Strategic Outcomes, in 2002, management consultants NDMC Ltd created an
Information Worker Action Framework. The Action Framework is a method and
relational database system that gives organizations the means to measure

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 21


Information Worker Productivity by understanding the alignment of Information
Worker actions with strategic outcomes.

8
As I describe in the book Agilization, an Action Framework places Information
Worker actions at the heart of the business planning framework by managing
and measuring four key perspectives. These are:
OUTCOME – Actions must achieve an outcome that benefits the organization.
Any action that does not directly have a relationship to an organizational
outcome is likely to be a waste of resources.
OWNERSHIP – Someone must be accountable for the achievement of outcomes
to which actions contribute. This individual may not be the same person tasked
with performing it. For any action, both ownership of the outcome and ownership
of performing the action should be considered.
LEARNING – Leaders must always question why they are doing what they are
doing. This requires a clear appreciation of what led to actions being formalised.
New information that might influence how an action is performed (or whether it
should be performed at all) should be accessible to the portfolio holder
responsible for the achievement of the outcome.
EVALUATION – Performing any action expends resource. For any action there is
an opportunity cost that should be evaluated so the organization can govern its
behaviours appropriately.

Learning and Knowledge Framework

Organizations seeking to achieve a step change in Information Worker Productivity
will need to equip them with the right skills.

Corporate learning systems of the last decade have placed their focus on
husbanding content more than outcomes and use of sporadic class-room courses
rather than coherent on-the-job development tools and services. A platform for
learning provides a single system for managing the life-cycle of learning –
including on-the-job knowledge development - providing the essential services
needed by systems administrators, educational practitioners, learners and other
stakeholders. Uniquely it places a focus on aligning learning investments to the
level of Information Worker Productivity improvement.

Within a platform for learning, practitioners define learning pathways comprising of
training needs, learning interventions and learning outcomes. This results in the
formation of pathway templates. Learning pathways are created by either
adopting one of the pre-defined templates or by creating a new pathway based on
an assembly of training needs, learning interventions and learning outcomes.

Socially Oriented Architecture (Re-defining ‘SOA’)

Organizations that seek to improve their Information Worker Productivity and
exploit the potential of social networks, industry partnerships and communities
require a new form of computing environment.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 22


A Social Operating System is an Internet delivered technology platform that
supports the systematic management and facilitation of human social relationships
and interactions. Businesses will come to see Social Operating Systems as a
replacement to high-cost enterprise content management software and person-to-
person communications tools like email that no longer fit the needs of workers or
organizations as the world of work becomes ever more virtualised and
collaborative.

A Social Operating System consists of two main technology layers:

The Inner Layer – the cloud computing platform and administration tooling

This is the infrastructure and tooling layer used by IT people to provision
computing services. Its function is to enable Social Operating Systems super-users
to design and deploy applications. Key attributes include:

 Multi-tenant (cloud) hosting infrastructure that provides secure and
resilient 24x7 access to services accessed via a standard Internet Browser.
PCs, consoles and computer servers are being displaced by a gigantic
digital computing platform in the clouds. IT analyst firms predict a
spending spree on cloud computing technologies with some suggesting
that by 2013 nearly one third of IT spending growth will be cloud based.
The ‘cloud’ continues a journey of digital discovery that started in earnest
with the PC and moved into hyper-drive with the World Wide Web.

 The ability to manage user identities and groups. These capabilities
give applications developers and administrators the means to architect
portal environments that provide users with self-service administration of
users and groups associated with their secure collaborative spaces.

 Data integration tools. These are data connectors and integration
toolkits that enable users to link to data held across the Web and also
from local sources such as text files, documents, Twitter feeds, Instant
Messages, email, databases, spreadsheets and other data types.

 Database and data structure creation tools. In support of applications
development it’s often necessary to create data structures. These tools
enable non-technical users to design these structures without exposing
them to complex database administration tools built for IT people.

 Process design and management tools. These tools give users the ability
to formalise business processes without needing to be IT experts.

 Applications design and deployment tools. These tools de-skill the task
of creating applications. Vendors like Encanvas provide point-and-click or
drag and drop user interfaces to remove the need for programming or
scripting skills.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 23


 The provision of application assemblies. These are ready-made building
blocks used to simplify and de-skill applications design. They cover
frequently used components such as Gant charts, blogs, wikis, opinion
polls, file management, file transfer, geo-spatial mapping, search, print,
instant messaging, charting and other types assemblies that less technical
people can use.

 Portal ‘look and feel’ design and configuration. These tools provide
systems administrators with the ability to architect the deployed portal
spaces. When deploying a portal space, administrators require the ability
to setup data source connections, user permissions, menu hierarchies,
appearance settings and many other attributes.

 Log files and reporting. These tools give super users knowledge of user
activity, user behaviours and log files required for problem identification.

The Outer Layer

This is the Portal that users of Social Operating Systems will see.

The nine topics of the outer layer Social Operating System are:

1. Security

2. Relationships

3. Communication

4. Content

5. Collaboration

6. Commerce

7. App Store

8. Data Integration

9. Agile Dev.

13
In his book Social Operating Systems Ian Tomlin interviews Ken Muir is Chief
Technology and Strategy Officer and VP of Product Management, for Collaboration
at Novell. “At Novell we see the ability to support private teams and group
structures as the killer-app for business adoption of social technology. With our
product we empower users to form secure ad-hoc private teams. Workers enjoy a
joined-up collaborate workspace whilst maintaining the privacy and governance
required by business; even when social networking structures extend across
multiple organizations - which in today’s business world is so often the case.”

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 24


13
Illustration of a Social Operating System (Source: Social Operating Systems, 2008)

A business-critical feature of Social Operating Systems that relates directly to
Information Worker Productivity lies in its ability to capture data as part of the day
job. Social Operating Systems capture everything that happens in the social
networks they support – who communicates with who, content that’s shared,
topics discussed, meetings held, applications and data sources accessed etc. –
which means knowledge of worker productivity is captured in near real-time without
requiring additional layers of reporting overheads like time-sheets, daily activity
logs and reports (etc.) that would otherwise require manual data entry. This tacit
productivity management is essential to effective measurement of IWP.

While many of the aspects of a Social Operating System will be familiar to readers,
two less familiar areas of technology advancement are Data Integration and
Situational Applications.

Data Integration

Enterprise computing has been characterised by the purchase of ‘ready-to-deploy’
applications for specific departments or processes. Even with the promise afforded
by Enterprise Resource Planning systems for a ‘single system’, organizations have
found it difficult if not impossible to develop and deploy coherent master data
management strategies that ensure any item of data is found only once in the
enterprise computing architecture.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 25


New data mashup solutions for the multi-threaded multi-sourcing of data from
vendors including TIBCO, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Jack-Be, Boomi and Encanvas
mean that organizations today can provide their Information Workers with tools to
leverage data assets no-matter where they are or what file format they are in,
provided they have appropriate data access permissions.

Situational Applications

Since the emergence of office computing a quality gap has existed between the
tools that data processing professionals use and those that ‘workers’ use.

Office software like Microsoft® Excel™ (spreadsheets), Microsoft® PowerPoint™
(presentations), Microsoft® Word™ (word processor documents) and Microsoft®
Access™ (database) have become the ‘systems of last resort’ for Information
Workers that are afforded limited access to better-fit tools. Use of office desktop
tools forms ‘shadow systems’ that IT leaders often have little or no knowledge of.

IT teams today are faced with growing lists of demands from information workers
for applications that combine disparate combinations of information assets to
create applications that respond to new business situations and mobility.

This growing list for new applications is being described as the ‘long-tail’ of
software applications (i.e. a small number of individuals and small groups of users
who need to use large numbers of applications as opposed to the majority of users
who only require a small number of applications).

An effective way of serving this demand is to provide Information Workers with
the self-service tools they need to create database-driven business applications
using a combination of serviced applications, pre-shaped application sub-
assemblies (sometimes called ‘widgets’) and mashup applications that employ
code-free drag-and-drop, point-and-click or wizard-based authoring tools to
enable the on-demand authoring and deployment of professional applications.

These capabilities are essential features of a Social Operating System.

The Pathway to Enterprise Information Worker Productivity

Along with advances in the application of enterprise computing and cloud-based
social collaboration, attitudes towards the role, design, resourcing and governance
of organizations is set to change over the next decade. This section explores in
more detail the process of change from the present day culture of officer worker
environments to a future wanted state of a productivity-enabled information
working ecosystem.

I summarise the pathway to a fifty-fold increase in Information Worker Productivity
in 10 steps to set a priority to activities that must happen in order to achieve this
outcome, although the starting point for some organizations will be different
based on their present circumstances.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 26


1. Reset the DNA

Give the organization a new persona. Start a day-one change of
organizational identity that acknowledges the role of brand, teams,
communities, industry value chains, economic pathways, ability to change,
Re-visit the suitability of command and control.

This must happen first because it underpins all of the initiatives that follow.

2. Establish and communicate a vision and strategy.

Set a compelling vision. It is important to engage with stakeholders
throughout this process to ensure their aspirations are also considered
and they feel included in the exercise. Failure to do so will result in
resistance to change later.

3. Adopt Customer Value Management principles.

Aim to satisfy customer value better than competitors and be first to
market. Competitive advantage will come from customer value creation
through the application of new ideas.

4. Install an Enterprise Action Framework.

Measure the value of Information Worker contributions made against
stakeholder outcomes.

5. Employ the right skills at the right time.

It is unrealistic to believe that organizations will continue to seek to ‘own’
their staffing resources through full-time employment contracts. The
social web will increase the ability of organizations to implement on-
demand human resourcing for projects. A tipping point will occur in the
next decade when it becomes economically unviable to employ staffing
resources and the majority of projects will be fulfilled by expert contracted
workers. The challenge for economies will be to develop mechanisms to
ensure this new resourcing approach maintains standards of IP protection,
business continuity, governance and productivity performance.

6. Equip workers with applications that are fit for purpose.

Workers will expect to gain access to information acquisition, aggregation,
analysis and communications tools that suit their job role and persona.
They will expect to access content that is event-driven, fine grained and
contextualised to their needs.

7. Create a socially-oriented operating systems environment that aids
empowerment, community development, and that leverages skills
and social networks.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 27


Workers will demand the intuitive, personalizable and self-served Social
Operating System tools similar in style and operation to tools they use at
home.

8. Provision a learning and knowledge framework that aligns learning
programmes to outcomes, recognises the value of on-the-job
knowledge and skills development and that focuses on learning
outcomes rather than learning content.

Learning and education is becoming a life-long, self-help activity. But
organizations will continue to need to invest in learning to develop their
human resources. A higher proportion of learning investments will be
through social and charitable investments but even these will be measured
by the level of contribution they produce to desired strategic outcomes.

9. Drive results through systematic management methods including the
adoption of tacit productivity measurement techniques.

Organizations with smaller, more expert management teams will rely on
systematic management methods and tacit productivity measurement
techniques to ensure project teams achieve their goals.

10. Install and maintain a single view of the organization

Through all of these activities, organizations will need to work much
harder at maintaining their ‘organizational essence’ articulated through
their brand values and behaviours. A key operational characteristic of
excellent organizations lie in their ability to manage a single view of data,
processes, projects and outcomes. Understanding ‘what the organization
excels at’ and focusing on this activity and market positioning will be key
to survival in a digital global economy where ‘love marks’ will dominate.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 28


Conclusion

Chief Financial Officers have the opportunity lead their organizations
in the pursuit of a step-change in Information Worker Productivity
through modern management thinking and the deployment of
Enterprise Productivity Management tools.

Information Worker Productivity can achieve the fifty-fold increase that Peter
Drucker envisioned but no IT Silver bullet solution exists, or will ever exist, to make
it happen. The starting point, as with all successful transformations in the way
organizations work, is to acknowledge that culture change – leadership, vision,
behaviours, passion – always must lead the change agenda but that tooling change
must follow.

A step change in productivity will happen this decade but only for those
organizations that:

 Re-invent their persona, design and levels of agility.

 Acknowledge the role IWP plays as an enabler to profitability and
competitive advantage through stakeholder value creation.

 Measure IWP in a more appropriate way.

 Re-invent the tooling used by Information Workers.

 Implement management frameworks that cement these changes.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 29


Glossary and References

Glossary

Action Framework – The idea that organizations should adopt a method of
managing the relationship between day-to-day Information Worker actions and
organizational outcomes to reliably enable the measurement of Information
Worker contributions.

Balanced Scorecard – The idea that organizations should adopt a model of
business performance evaluation that balances measures of performance by the
four perspectives of: (1) financial performance, (2) what matters to customers, (3)
internal processes and (4) innovation – to balance their score card – instead of only
thinking about financial returns.

Economic Pathway - The idea that organizations must work together to generate
customer value by making contributions to processes that cut across industries or
(at least) communities of organizations.

Golden Threads – The idea that organizations should agree on an assembly of
strategic management initiatives that will deliver long-term stakeholder outcomes
and therefore provide clarity of purpose to the reasons why actions are fulfilled if
not for the achievement of short-term goals. A mechanism to ensure that strategic
plans of an organization are not motivated by the short-term gain of executives.

Open Book Management - The idea that organizations are most effective if their
accounts are left open for all their employees to see as and when they wish, at the
same time as the employees are taught to understand better the full financial
picture.

Six Sigma – An approach to process review and redesign that seeks to improve
the quality of process outputs by identifying and removing the causes of defects
(errors) and minimising variability in manufacturing and business processes.

Triple Bottom Line – The idea that organizations should measure not just one
bottom line (i.e. Profitability), but three. The triple bottom line (TBL) consists of
three Ps: profit, people and planet. It aims to measure the financial, social and
environmental performance of the corporation over a period of time. It is argued
that only a company that produces a TBL is taking account of the full cost involved
in doing business.

© 2012 NDMC Ltd 30

CFO Briefing: Information Worker Productivity

CFO Briefing: Information Worker Productivity

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