Business executives wrestle with this idea continually – how do you drive productivity in your business? It is a finite problem. There are only so many hours in a day and for most companies only so many people that you can employ. How do you make them productive? How do you enable them to do their best work in the most efficient manner so as to optimise production and minimise costs?
To answer these questions let’s look at some of the ways that people work. We either work alone or in teams. Invariably we all have to ask others for information every day. And most of us interact with one or more computer systems daily. These activities can be broadly grouped into Structured Work and Unstructured Work.

Structured work is typically done using a computer system where a business process has been defined and we follow that process for each interaction. For example Sales Order Processing – every transaction although different goes through the same process with the same outcome and the information that we require to carry out the transaction is held in the system that we use. Many of us work this way every day, but the vast majority of people in a business are involved in Unstructured Work every day.

Unstructured work is made of everyday business activities like, taking a customer, supplier or partner telephone call, writing and responding to emails, sitting in meetings either with customers or with other staff members to make decisions and share information.

In most cases this is where the big productivity gains are to be realised. Structured work for the most part is based on systems vendors basing their product offerings on global best practise so in most cases whatever can be optimised from a productivity perspective has already been done.

Unstructured work is a quagmire of complexity. Take what is today a very simple task of making a telephone call. Even in this modern day we make calls, leave messages and have to follow up time and time again simply because we do not understand or perceive availability in our communications.

Think of the simple task of collaborating around a customer proposal. We create a document and then proceed to email it to everyone in the team for updates and contributions. Pretty soon everybody is confused about which version of the document is being used, what contributions have been added etc.

research etc into a single repository that holds all the information that each team member could possibly require given the task at hand.

We then extend the reach of the team portals into the division introducing the ability to Search for information across team sites thereby ensuring access to information and optimising knowledge management by allowing other teams to leverage off work that has already been completed in the past. Finally these portals extend out into the business itself and in many customers out to the Internet and Extranet giving customers and partners access to the information that they require to transaction and collaborate with a business.

As we grow these solutions we introduce best practises around Document Lifecycle Management and Enterprise Content Management. More often than not Records Management because a requirement because of the compliance requirements expected from companies.

While crucial as an element of productivity how teams create and share documents and gain access to information is only small part of the collaborative cycles.

Team Communications
More often than not team communications in the form of telephone calls, emails and even instant messaging become crucial for effective teams to function. Taking the guess work, the wasted time and call costs out of making telephone calls drives immediate productivity gains into companies. Using Microsoft Office Communications Server and Microsoft communications tools we introduce Application level Instant Messaging and Voice communications into the portals and the Microsoft Office tools people are using. Using the idea of Presence (when a person is online) I can see when people are available and thus am able to make connections with them first time seriously riving out wasted costs.

Unifying Voice, email, Instant Messaging and other telephony services into a single Outlook Inbox ensure people get the information and are able to make either written or voce responses right there from Outlook.

Content Management
Once these tools are in place the challenge fast becomes how to manage and traverse all the information. How do you find that one document with the proposal for the customer, or how do you find the signed customer proposal?
Helping companies to understand the document life cycle and the use of meta data to build document taxonomies while automating tasks and enabling workflows completes the journey giving companies the tools and access to the information as and when they need it.
Finally realising this type of productivity sounds complex and costly and it would be if you purchased technologies enablers from different vendors, but using Microsoft’s platform and the extensive reach of the Microsoft Office product set i5 are able to provide these solutions for a fraction of the cost while helping businesses realise their investment in Microsoft technologies.