Improve Information Worker Productivity using Web Portals

Corporations, both large and small, are looking for innovative ways to make their work force more productive and cut underlying costs. One of the key cost component is the Information Worker. As an Enterprise Architect, I have been involved in developing the Information Worker Productivity Strategy and looking at the BIG picture. To begin with here are a few key business requirements for IW:

Business:
1) Improve the productivity of Information Worker (IW) by providing them a new set of tools to perform their job.
2) Empower the business users to perform more with least involvement from IT.
3) Provide better audit and compliance tools.
4) Empower the growing Mobile workforce with new tools. Business users demand anywhere any kind of access to their documents, applications, etc and from any device, including portable thin clients (Blackberry, net books, etc).

Technical:
5) Upgrade our current technology tools to address the changing business requirements.
6) Deploy a new web enabled “application platform” to support the emerging requirements(Social media, enterprise search, single sign-on, etc) in Information Infrastructure.
7) Increase the refresh cycle of PCs/laptops beyond 3 yrs so as to cut costs.

There are many more business and technical requirements derived from these, as we will discuss here.

Information Workers (IW) or sometime referred to as Knowledge Workers (KW) need a set of tools to perform their job similar to a plumber coming to a job site with a tool chest. We are as good as our tools. So that we are on the same page, IW are people who make strategic decisions, create new solutions, deal with uncertainty or whose processes are not structured. These people gather information, share information, create documents, meet with other people, comprise almost 50% of an expense of a modern corporation. Email usually tops the list for them as a killer app which IMO, may not be the panacea for most of their processes and requirements. To make the IW/KW more productive, we would need to analyze their current processes.

Going back to initial days of automation, the early computers mainly Mainframes focused on automating business applications like Payroll, Inventory Management, Accounting, etc. After a while, however the IW realized, they have requirements beyond just automating business apps. What about managing the work in supporting these business apps – creation & storage of office documents, communication between IW, accounting spreadsheets, etc. While the M’frames were ideal, at that time, for automating business apps, they were not very user friendly and cost effective for managing these other supporting tasks of IW. In other words, the IW out grew their current business requirements and the tools they had did not fully support their new business requirements. Another challenge was these M’frames could be accessed only via a dumb terminal so the IW were restricted to a data center to perform their job and not from their corporate office.

Microsoft (the biggest beneficiary of PC/server age) came in with a low cost PC solution which seemed to suffice to the new IW requirements. IW could create & store documents, in a more user-friendly and less-costly locations other than M’Frame repositories. IW could communicate using email, create small business apps using MS Access – imagine a DB right under your hood rather than pleading with your IT dept to build a low cost app for you on the big-iron!! Tho creating localized Access solutions may not been the right solution for mission critical apps considering reliability, manageability, back-ups, etc, but it did empower the business community IW to take charge of some their daily tasks. The business user could do many things for which otherwise they would have to go their IT dept.
IW could access their M’frame apps right from the comfort of their corporate office rather than travelling to the data center, thanks to Super Session. What a productivity gain and cost savings!!!

Remember, compared to the stability of M’frame apps at that time, the PC & Server solutions did not appear to compete with their rival as a viable business solution. May be for this reason, Strategists and Visionaries at companies like IBM had difficulty visualizing beyond their M ‘Frames. However they missed the key fact that the business requirements of IW are changing. Companies were looking to cut costs and be more productive while supporting their business. Over a period of more than couple of decades, these distributed solutions have matured a lot!

In current times, we have not completely moved away from M’frames, but they are not the key component of many corporate information infrastructure.

Well the PC/Server boom has been in place for a while and life has been good until now where we have again outgrown the business requirements of IW. Companies are at cross roads to cut their costs and make their work force more productive, thanks to the current global financial crisis.

So what are the new business requirements of IW?

As I listed in business requirements above, with the ubiquitous internet, IW want to work from anywhere using any kind of device and expect full access to their data and apps. As I envision, top half of the corporate pyramid (the most influential ones!) would be able to perform most of their tasks using portable devices like BB, iPhones, Netbooks, etc. The Green Economics is also pushing IW in this direction. IW do not want to be tied to their PCs or laptops or their physical office. Besides the cost of managing and supporting PCs and laptops is becoming a major concern considering installing, patching, training for apps on these devices. IW expect simple, to-the-point web applications. Besides the corporate liability of one of these devices getting stolen or lost with data and apps on it is another major concern.

With so many data and apps to deal with, also called information overload, the IW wants to create a personalized, relevant view of their enterprise with the current working documents, apps, email, dashboards, tasks, etc. They wish to keep this personalized corporate view dynamic as their priorities change and further wish to take it with them on their portable mobile device like a BB.

Corporations seek to capture and search the knowledge in IW heads (human capital). Even tho most documents are stored in repositories on file shares or formal document management systems, email seems to capture a lot of knowledge sharing around these documents. Email as a knowledge and document repository has various limitations. Some of the new Web 2.0 technologies like Wikis, Blogs, RSS seems to fit the possible solution. Using social media initiatives, Corporations intend to virtually extend their enterprise beyond their corporate boundaries to tap into the crowd intelligence and diverse opinions, if you go with the notion that someone knows something out there and how can I connect to that person.

IWs want to securely search thru various layers of corporate repositories. This makes a business case for an enterprise Search engine.

Cloud computing or Software-as-a-Service (SAAS) appears to be another major cost savings for corporations if they can get beyond some of the legal and technical challenges. Corporations would prefer to focus on their business and apps for it without getting into the business of developing and maintaining them. As an example, for many businesses, cost of procuring, patching and supporting common apps like MS Office is becoming unsustainable. Cost of running and maintaining data centers is another corporate challenge. Computing Technologies are getting more complex and intertwined and corporations would prefer to off load this complexity and keep it out of their business scope.

Most new software solutions are usually web applications rather than on Windows or M’Frame. This requires a new set of development and application delivery tools.

The current set of IW tools – PCs & laptops, email, file shares, MS Office, etc. do not fully address some of these new requirements. Also deploying multiple solutions for different requirements- for example a wiki solution, an enterprise search engine, an RSS reader, etc can fragment your information infrastructure there by defeating the primary goal of improving IW productivity at a lower cost. It can also impact user adoption which is the key for these new solutions to be successful. As an example, I could bring in a Wiki solution, however if it does not integrate with my AD and users have to remember their user-id & password, that would impact user adoption. Besides I should be to search thru that wiki repository using my enterprise search engine in order to fully exploit the benefits to IW. So a well integrated set of tools, preventing isolated silos of apps and data is the key.

Microsoft office Sharepoint Server (MOSS) is a web platform that provides a set of tools to address these new IW requirements. I want to mention, IMO, MOSS is not a fully mature solution and would need to go thru a maturity phase similar to initial PC solutions as I discussed above, however it is a good start, if you have most of your current business infrastructure on Microsoft technologies (Windows PCs & servers, Active Directory, MS Office, etc). To its advantage, MOSS has the most available set of add-ons to integrate with other vendors products & technologies, there by reducing your integration costs. MOSS provides tools to empower the business community to do more of their tasks with least involvement from IT. Deploying MOSS in an enterprise without corporate guidelines and governance can lead to chaos also. It does require its business users and stakeholders to understand the Big picture and primary strategic objective of deploying this technology, some of which I discussed above. These technologies challenges its users to retire some of the old way of doing their job and adopt new methods – more of a culture change. I recommend strategy first and technology second - look at the problem being solved before approaching a solution. Look for the low hanging fruit and quick wins to fuel this long term initiative.