Advantages of User Productivity Systems

Employees’ life quality: the ultimate goal of any organization

We have all heard that employees are the main asset of any organization. This phrase has been used so many times that in certain way, we have lost its importance. It is true: we all that “borrow” our knowledge and skills are the main reason of all companies exist. There will not be any organization, market, or industry without people that spends its time and resources working for it. It is in the main interest of everybody that we all get more productive. It is the interest of companies owners because they want to increase their profits, it is in the interest of employees because they want to spend more time on personal projects, it is on the interest of consumers because they want their demands to be satisfied almost immediately. None of previous objectives could be achieved without tools that improve everybody’s productivity. This is the main objective of User Productivity Systems: help everybody to do more in a fixed period of time.

We know now that there are some tools grouped under User Productivity System name but the question would be: what are these tools? Are we talking about software, hardware, or combination of both? Any information system (combination of hardware and software) that improves productivity qualifies. E-mail system is a software productivity tool, but iPad® is a mix of software and hardware that improves productivity for mobile resources. There is not a clear rule of how much hardware or software is required to create a User Productivity System. Think that any gadget of software in your computer that allows you to leave office early is part of this group. This opens the discussion to another interesting point that I will talk in a subsequent blog: the abuse of these tools have increased the amount of work that a person does eliminating the original objective of these systems. If I ask you if you see e-mail as a tool that helps you go home earlier, a lot of you will answer that is the opposite. A Blackberry® device, originally created to improve productivity, sometimes has to be turned off in order to accomplish planned daily objectives. Please do not get confused: the tools are there to increment productivity, the abuse on these tools usage is complete responsibility of users.

One interesting feature of these systems is that they have been created without any specific usage in mind: they are not for doctors or engineers only. These tools have been designed to work for everybody: you can plan a wedding party or manage a construction project with it. This makes your organization a target for these tools: you can’t say that you do not need these tools, we all require some help to improve our performance.

Examples of these tools are office related work software (MS Office® Suite kind of products), e-mail, time management, web conference, antivirus protection, documents sharing, and all software you have installed in your laptop, desktop or mobile devices. The general nature of these systems make difficult to define all its benefits: a doctor can generate a diagnostic 50% faster receiving lab results thru e-mail increasing its patients life quality, while a teacher can speed up its grades improving the time he leaves the office. Both cases have different tangible benefits but in both we can see a constant: life quality is improved in one way or another. 

We started this blog entry mentioning that employees are the main asset of any organization, improving your employees’ life quality thru the usage of these tools will position your organization to succeed. This is the biggest benefit of these tools!!

Advantages of Business Support Systems

We can’t make business without a Business Support System

Even it can sound as a great contradiction; there are some businesses that do not invest as they have in its business core functions. These businesses continue relaying its main functions in manual or even undocumented and unrepeatable processes. In this way, these organizations are loosing dollars processing its day-to-day tasks in the least optimal way. The immediate question would be why if there are a set of IT tools to support business functions some continue not using those. There are three main reasons for this behavior:

1.- Companies do not know these systems exist

2.- They have created some “systems” that currently support their operations

3.- Implementation of these systems require an important investment

Let’s start with the easiest one: some companies do not know that there are Business Support Systems. Business Support Systems is a term used to describe a series of systems to support business operations. Think in all the activities that a company can perform during its normal business day: sales, invoicing, customer management, product management, marketing, and others. All these activities can be automated and optimized thru the use of applications dedicated to each one but the most important: a Business Support solution integrates all these processes and delivers information in a single enterprise view. This single view is a major asset for executive decisions and strategy.

About the second one, some companies already knew the benefits and characteristics of the Business Support Systems but did not get the correct advice or expert consultancy and created their own version of these applications. You can find in multiple companies, legacy systems that accomplish the task they were created for, but are expensive to maintain, and are not integrated with other Business Support applications. This lack of integration is one of the main disadvantages of these solutions. Without an integrated view of all company processes, decisions are taken under incorrect premises.

The last reason for a lack of a Business Support system is maybe also the most common: implement a solution that delivers all the benefits of these systems requires a high investment that not all companies can afford. As we saw before, some companies have tried to avoid the significant investment of these solutions creating its own systems. We have talked about the consequences of this decision but have not talked about the reasons of it; one main reason is the investment to install this kind of solutions. The key idea on this is that if we only see the cost part of the equation, it will be really difficult to justify the investment. A professional and detailed analysis has to be made in order to identify all the savings that this kind of solutions will bring to the enterprise. Some examples of the benefits that can be achieved thru the implementation of a system like this are:

1.- Savings thru processes’ redesign

2.- Savings thru processes integration

3.- Maintenance cost reduction implementing an integrated solution instead of multiple not integrated tools.

4.- Centralized data repository for strategic decisions

5.- Competitive advantage thru the ability of adapt business easier and faster

If we can measure the magnitude of these savings and compare it against the investment, we will take the best decision for the company. This is a business analysis prior than a technology one. Multidisciplinary teams have to be created in order to gather requirements from all the units in a business so implementation benefits the whole company and not just on functional area.

It is highly recommended that analysis and implementation of his kind of systems is leader by individuals that had experience in implementation of this size and have worked with companies of multiple sectors. 

The advantage of Transactional Systems

Because everything on life is a transaction.

In our normal life, we are used to execute multiple transactions: when we pay at the end of our shopping experience, when we withdraw money from an ATM, or when we start a phone call. Even we daily execute multiple transactions, not everybody is able to describe what a transactional system is. Let's define a transaction as an interaction between two entities. Thru this general definition we are including lots of daily activities like turn on our computer or check our email in our cellular phone. Under IT perspective, in order an interaction between two entities can be considered a transaction, it has to have the ACID properties:

• Atomicity
• Consistency
• Isolation
• Durability

Atomicity means that transactions are successful or unsuccessful without any midterm (TV is turned on or off, there is no middle state); Consistency means that transactions are performed under the predefined set of operating rules (a purchase can not have negative amounts, consequently, all transactions with negative sign are rejected); Isolation means that transactions must appear as one even it can consist of a series of steps (funds transfer looks like one transaction only even is comprised of a debit and a credit); Durability means that once a transaction is done, it can not be undone (in case of errors, additional transaction to compensate the first one error has to be issued).

Companies as people transact all time: with customers, providers, other companies, authorities, and internally between departments. All these transactions are normally the result of the operational model that each company has created. Company operation is in the foundation of every business and has to be handled and operated with the highest performance standards possible. Organizations can improve its profits optimizing its current processes. Imagine the savings implementing an automated credit card payment system. Instead customers have to go and pay with cash in one of a retailer store, they can pay online thru a transactional system independently of where customers are located; providers can check online orders and supply what is required on committed time; tax payments can be executed automatically thru a bank transfer transaction, and many other applications a transactional system can provide.

From previous examples we can infer the following benefits for any organization:

1.- Redesign its current processing model

2.- Operational cost reduction

3.- Online and real time organizational information

4.- Expand customer base

As listed, the first immediate benefit introducing transactional systems is the opportunity to redesign how business operates today. This exercise can be as difficult as it was to start up the business at the beginning. Organizations that want to take real advantage of transactional systems have to be advised by organizations or consultants that have experienced what is to implement a transactional system without dying in the process. Is important that organizations commit with a project of this nature acquiring the correct resources: technological, and human. There is not such a thing of one-size fits all in transactional systems. This is why a lot of analysis work has to be done beforehand in order to successfully deliver the benefits of these solutions.