Reg readers say: Having the right info is key to productivity
Anyone here work in Financial Services? Help us out
Posted in Management, 18th November 2011 14:08 GMT
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Ensuring that people have the information they need when they need it is the single most important element when it comes to productivity in the workplace. At least, that’s what you guys told us when we conducted a survey on end user productivity earlier this year.
However, your answers to our questions also made it amply clear that there’s a gap, not to say a yawning chasm, between reality and the desired state. The majority of organisations are at best doing a middling job, and only a very small number class themselves as doing ‘very well’ at making sure everybody has the information they need when they need it.
So there’s clearly some work to be done, and one might expect that to be reflected in companies’ IT investment priorities. Except that it doesn’t seem to be happening. While a lot of companies recognise the need to make improvements, many state that they’re not planning to do anything about it. Lack of funding no doubt plays a role; and yet, we also get the impression that when there’s a will, some money can usually be found.
What is it then that prevents companies from investing in the tools and services needed to deliver the right information to the right place at the right time? It doesn’t seem to have much to do with industry sector per se – manufacturing and financial services are no different when it comes to recognising the overall importance of ‘right information, right time, right place.’ When it comes to the detail, though, different sectors will be taking different approaches.
To find out more, we’re starting by taking an in-depth look at the issue from a Financial Services perspective. So if you’re working anywhere in the Financial Services industry, it would be great if you could help us understand in more detail what’s going on by completing this survey If you’re not working in FS, we’d still love to hear your views – please keep your comments coming. ®
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COMMENTS
Having worked in FS for many years I can tell you the problem quite easily.
Managers' interests and departments' interests rarely coincide with the interests of the organisation as a whole.
A manager who is given a task and achieves it with the minimum of fuss, using the least resources just plods along from year to year going nowhere (not me, I was a techie and architect.)
A manager who is fundamentally bad at his or her job and constantly makes a fuss and demands more and more resources to finish the job and more and more time in meeting with senior management to discuss the way forward, not only increases his or her profile, but also the size of his or her empire.
More efficient usage of information would require less underlings and less fuss. Therefore the efforts would go largely unnoticed.
Many incompetant managers and departments can get on in this way quite unintentionally. Slightly more canny managers can deliberately engineer it to be so.
Problem solved. Where's my fee ? :)
They don't do it because they don't know why they should
I suspect the reason why companies like the one I work for (and who's social media policy forbids me from naming) don't do MI/BI is they don't have the depth of experience in their business to know why they should.
Well, that and the fact that it might be used by the board to sack them for being useless t***s.
Why bring your master a stick they could hit you with?
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