Network World Fusion :: Industry leaders, academics focus on productivity
By Jennifer Mears
...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.
...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."
Analysts are also tracking this effort to better manage the use of information-focused technology. Mike Gotta, a senior vice president at the Meta Group, for example, talks about what he calls the Knowledge Worker Infrastructure, which enables workers to use IT resources to interact with the information - and coworkers, partners and customers - they need when they need it.
"It's about people - it's how people get connected to information and processes so we can make the whole organization more productive," he says.
Efforts to create a knowledge worker infrastructure in organizations are just beginning, with pharmaceutical and high-tech manufacturing firms leading the way, Gotta says.
"By 2004, we believe only 15% of Global 2000 companies will have developed an enterprise-wide strategy for pulling together diverse KWI activities. By 2006, 50% of G2000 enterprises will have a strategic plan to address KWI needs, growing to 80% in 2008," Gotta writes in a research note on the subject...
K-Collector Topics: Corporations email Events innovation knowledge work Productivity Video Writing Cisco Intel Microsoft