Social, political, economic and demographic trends are transforming the landscape of global commerce, but businesses are still challenged to achieve success according to traditional measures: profitability, market share, customer satisfaction and innovation. Over the past 50 years, information technology (IT) has played a critical role both in creating the conditions for change and in helping organizations adapt to it. As we move toward a world that is more fluid, less centralized and less certain about old assumptions and old models, IT is evolving in ways that will empower organizations, teams and individuals to realize their potentials in a new world of work.
Certainly much of the change in the world is driven by technological innovation: more powerful software and computing systems, the Internet and pervasive wireless connectivity. The proliferating use of information has been instrumental in achieving better outcomes for businesses and higher productivity for workers. However, in celebrating the success of these advances, we should not forget that the ability to adapt and innovate is fundamentally a human talent. Empowering people to work more efficiently and effectively in the “digital workstyle” of the new world of work should be at the center of any organization’s strategy as it addresses the coming era of rapid change and increasing global integration.
The Challenges of a More Connected World
As the world becomes more interconnected through systems and networks, the walls that isolated workers from information, organizational objectives, and each other will continue to fall. While removing barriers enables many exciting new capabilities, it also means exposing workers to a new world of uncertainties, a deluge of information, demands on attention, and new skills to master. Sustaining high productivity growth in the face of these new complexities is a critical challenge as the new world of work evolves of the coming decade.
Workers and organizations are already nearing the point of “information overload,” where the sheer volume of data and the complexity of the applications necessary to work with it threaten to overwhelm the powers of human cognition. According to IDC, a typical information worker in North America has seen the daily volume of business-related email increase by a factor of ten since 1997. Meanwhile, the aggregate number of all business-related electronic communications – email, instant messages, meeting requests – is rising rapidly as well.
These distractions have a demonstrable effect on the productivity and health of workers. According to a recent study by the Families and Work Institute, 56 percent of workers said they typically have to work on too many tasks simultaneously or are so interrupted that they find it difficult to get work done. Nearly one-third said they often or very often don’t feel they have the time to process or reflect on the work they do. Stress-related health problems among information work professionals are already a huge cost to employers. In the UK, for example, it’s estimated that stress accounted for nearly a third of all absenteeism and sick leave – by far the leading cause of missed work.
The lesson here is that information workers’ tools need to evolve to meet the emerging challenges of information overload. A robust vision of information worker productivity can’t simply keep adding an endless proliferation of channels and features without also addressing prioritization, context, attention management, and better, smarter ways to visualize and control volumes of complex data. In a nutshell – simplification and insight.
The Central Role of Information Workers
The rise of IT as a driver and enabler of modern business has been accompanied by the rise of a new class of worker: the information worker. Information workers were initially those inside the organization responsible for the production, analysis and distribution of information: the writers, editors, financial analysts, planners and facilitators who were the first adopters of technology such as the word processor, the spreadsheet, email and presentation software. As IT spread across the enterprise and applications became less structured and more user-friendly, the tools and practices of information work came to be adopted by more and more roles within the organization. Today, information pervades every aspect of the modern organization, from executive decision-makers to customer-service representatives, skilled professionals like doctors and engineers, and those who work in the call center or the retail bank branch.
Advances in technology over the last two decades have transformed the world of work and commerce, driving wave after wave of economic growth and opportunity worldwide, dramatically changing many industries and opening new competitive opportunities for organizations small and large. Companies like eBay, Amazon, Wal-Mart, Dell, Jet Blue and Etrade – to name just a few – have transformed the playing field in all industries, from retailing to manufacturing to transportation and financial services.
As the business world became more information-intensive in the 80s and 90s, organizations which invested in their people and their systems benefited from the ability to adapt rapidly to change. A similar opportunity exists today. Earlier challenges involved in creating, analyzing and manipulating information are being replaced by newer challenges surrounding the use, understanding and management of information. Industry analysts estimate that information workers spend up to 30% of their working day just looking for data they need. Further studies from Ford Motor and AIIM suggest that information workers spend 15-25% of their time on non-productive information-related activities.
All this is time not spent doing tasks with specific value to the organization, such as personnel review, sales analysis, budgeting, forecasting, project planning, or interacting with customers. Organizations will benefit substantially when their skilled, experienced workers can devote more time to high value tasks, and less time and energy tracking down the right version of a document, doing rework to integrate feedback from team members who were not well-connected to the collaborative process, traveling or managing logistics to convene group meetings.
Microsoft believes that the ability of organizations to embrace change, uncertainty and opportunities in the global economy are directly related to the empowerment of information workers at all levels of the organization. Empowering information workers means more than just giving them more software and more training. It means making it easier for them to bring their unique talents, experience and judgment to bear in situations where they can make an impact. It means making collaboration with colleagues down the corridor or around the world as natural as working alone. It means making access to information secure, ubiquitous and unobtrusive. It means simplifying the process of turning mountains of raw data into actionable intelligence, and closing the gap between simple information and productive action.
Software is a central tool in this process. It can help doctors treat patients more effectively at lower cost; it can help retailers optimize and personalize the shopping experience while achieving fine-grained management control for maximum efficiency; it can help information workers in any role reduce the stresses of “information overload” and leverage unprecedented visibility into the vast storehouses of information into insight and action.
Microsoft is committed to helping organizations realize these benefits. Current and upcoming versions of Microsoft Office extend the traditional personal productivity suite of authoring and analysis tools to enable greater organizational productivity. As we move farther into the future, we are looking closely at the social, economic and demographic trends that our customers will face eight to 10 years out, along with promising developments in research and technology. While some of this thinking is not yet part of any formal product strategy, it is already informing the way we intend to approach information worker empowerment in the second decade of the 21st century.
Trends in the Workplace
Technology innovation doesn’t take place in a vacuum. The agile business deploys technology in response to changing conditions in the market, the workforce, the economy and society at large. While some aspects of the future will always remain uncertain until they happen, other trends clearly point toward the broader conditions and challenges that will define the business landscape in the coming five to 10 years.
Economic transformation: The transformation from a manufacturing-based economy to a services-based economy now underway throughout the developed world will accelerate. As cost pressures drain profitability away from activities that can readily be automated, outsourced or offshored, competitive advantage will accrue to those who can drive value with ideas: intellectual property, process innovation, strategic insights, and personalization of services. In this environment, winning organizations will find new ways to empower information workers with tools that amplify their human talents, connecting them organically to an information infrastructure that allows them to understand their role in the context of larger strategic objectives, find and collaborate with the right people, and make the best use of available data in their decision-making and work activities.
One World of Business. Political and economic dynamics are forging a single global market, a global workforce, global customers, partners, and suppliers. Collaboration across time-zones, across organizations, across firewalls will be commonplace. Organizations will be challenged to maintain the security and confidentiality of their IP in an environment of increasingly collaborative innovation and a nomadic global workforce of mobile and at-home employees, engaged through a variety of non-traditional employment arrangements.
Always On, Always Connected. The challenges of the “always on, always connected” world will be converting information into insights; managing time and staying focused on high priority tasks; finding the right information and connecting with the right people in an organization via the best channel; staying on the same page as colleagues; and managing the balance between work and family life. These kinds of challenges require a new generation of information work tools: ones that simplify rather than complicate, and automate many of the low-level tasks and decisions that currently clutter the lives and waste the time of information workers.
The Transparent Organization. The systems that make organizations more agile also make them more accountable. Governments, markets and consumers are demanding visibility into internal processes to ensure that businesses are acting in compliance with their legal, fiduciary and public responsibilities, and that the vast warehouses of personal data being collected are not being used to compromise privacy rights. Balancing compliance responsibilities with confidentiality has already proven to be a tricky and costly proposition. New technologies can help by giving organizations finer-grained control over the collection, management and security of their internal data in ways that are less burdensome on the business. The result will not only be enhanced ability to manage in a regulatory climate, but also better insights into organizational processes: insights that can be used as feedback for continuous process improvement and optimization.
NetGen Meets Baby Boom. For those just barely catching up with the tools and practices of information work today, the value of some of these developments may seem elusive. But for the workers who will be delivering the innovations and productivity growth of tomorrow, this technology not only won’t come as a surprise, it will be a positive expectation. The “net generation” that’s coming of age today has lived its entire life in the digital age. They are rapid adopters of new information technology and are not only comfortable, but expect to work collaboratively with others. They multi-task in ways that seem unfathomable to many. Email, the Internet, vivid real-time interactive games, instant messaging and mobile devices are as natural to kids today as the telephone, television and ballpoint pen were to the previous generation. Given what we know about the sociological profile of netgens, many of these workers will probably find surprising applications for the new technology, resulting in exciting changes that we couldn’t possibly predict today.
Competing for Talent in a Shrinking Workforce: Because demographics show an aging, shrinking workforce in most of the developed world over the next 50 years, maximizing the productivity of the workers that are available is critical. Competition for talent will be fierce, and the ability to provide young workers with the kinds of tools and technology that meet their expectations and make their work productive and rewarding, while also providing older workers with accessible tools that leverage their experience and skills, will be a key competitive differentiator among employers.
