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Enterprises need to know the answer to a simple question: Is mobile computing actually making a difference to the workforce? Productivity is notoriously difficult to measure accurately, let alone in the elusive area of enterprise mobility. How should companies go about it?
Professor Marco Iansiti of the Harvard Business School has found that it is best to review productivity for technology within business processes. He believes that previous measures have focused either at too high a level or on individual examples. Or, firms have taken a mathematical approach to show impact, measuring capital investment in IT versus business performance.
More recent techniques that involve looking at the business process level examine “technology in action — not for technology’s sake,” as Iansiti puts it, and provide a more realistic picture. For example, an assessment might examine how well customers are served and how quickly orders are processed, as opposed to the more conventional measure of the quantity of work carried out by staff members using a newly implemented technology.
MEASUREMENT BY SCENARIO
Techniques vary, but few have been developed to measure the effects of mobility. In one study on the impact of IT on global mid-size companies, Iansiti’s team took 40 business functions or “scenarios” where technology can be seen and reviewed in action. Mobile and remote access to information and processes was one aspect of this. The scenarios covered technology in use in five key functional areas: sales and marketing, finance, operations, “empowered professionals”, and IT infrastructure.
The team developed different frameworks for the three types of firms included in the research: those providing products, professional services and financial services. The study included information on IT capabilities and the number of employees. Financial data on profitability and growth and IT expenditure as a percentage of revenue over the previous three years was captured. The IT usage was rated high or low and the values of revenue growth per employee were benchmarked against similar firms. There was an eight percent difference in productivity between the top and bottom quartiles across different sectors.
Iansiti’s research shows that the key driver of worker productivity is a robust IT infrastructure — an important finding when it comes to assessing the impact of mobile technology.
NO EASY ANSWERS
Larger organizations should focus productivity measurement at the business unit level, Iansiti maintains. They can use scorecards to benchmark themselves against similar firms to find out if they are “leaders” or “followers.” “They can measure sales effectiveness and deploy better,” he says. “You have to get down to the nitty gritty of the individual function.”
Although Iansiti believes that companies have improved their evaluations of IT effectiveness, CIOs still sometimes go wrong by measuring how the IT itself performs, rather than the benefit it brings to the firm. Also, “as the organization grows larger, the impact of IT becomes more diffused and harder to measure,” Iansiti says. There is likely to be a wide variation in the way the technology is used, so broad conclusions as to whether it has succeeded or failed become blurred.
BEWARE OF FALSE DAWNS
Productivity often drops in the first two weeks after workers become mobile or begin working remotely, observes Jay Jamrog, Senior Vice President of Research, Institute for Corporate Productivity. This is usually because it takes time for employees to adjust to technologies and work practices. Productivity assessments need to take this into account, Jamrog says.
Jamrog believes that each company should develop its own metrics according to its specific business goals. This also applies to individual departments, since applying a single methodology across the firm could be misleading. Measuring revenue per employee is not helpful for gauging HR staff, for example.
Jamrog warns that it is misleading to postulate that a specific dollar figure per hour has been saved because employees can work more hours per week using a newly implemented PDA. This does not, he says, measure what employees are doing with their extra hours. Another area often overlooked when investigating mobile workers’ productivity involves the behaviors of their managers. The latter have to demonstrate trust, but, at the same time, they must carefully monitor the productivity of remote workers. “It takes a different leader with different qualities to strike the right balance,” Jamrog says. “Organizations need to work out how managers’ behaviors impact employee productivity.”
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