Earlier this month I attended the 2009 IBM Rational Software “As Real As It Gets” Conference in Orlando.
It was an inspiring conference full of belief and enthusiasm. Jamie Thomas, VP Product Development, Delivery and Customer Support at IBM Rational, presented on the three drivers for increasing business productivity today: Collaboration, Automation and Reporting. I really enjoyed this presentation as it got me thinking about how inefficient many of our daily work routines are, and how much more fun work would be if we could improve or eliminate them.
As humans we are social animals, so we need collaboration to have fun, and the more fun we have, the faster we get more things done.
Collaboration
What is collaboration really? As I see it, it is all about 1+1=3. If we have the environment and tools to share and collaborate around our ideas and our work, employees (and their companies) will be far more productive. For LOBs this translates to building business models and business processes collaboratively, and being able to share any resulting data, process automation and insightful reports with our peers.
Automation
Unfortunately, there are still too many tedious manual processes involved in our daily work. We log in to supplier websites to check availability, search the web for the best hotel deal, or walk to and from our desk to type in data gathered at the assembly line. Trivial manual processes are boring, unproductive, and inefficient. We need tools to automate these processes. Tools that automatically log in to partner websites to check availability, search and compare hotel prices, and even wrap desktop applications into mobile devices for anytime access.
Reporting
Most business decisions are based on reports. If these reports don’t exist already, we’re forced to create them. Yet another boring manual process. For example, we grab data from various business systems (company and partner apps and even info on the web) then we cut-and-paste into Excel to analyze it. Wouldn’t it be much more efficient if we could automate all that data gathering and feed it in to a modern, sharable web application that could be built and modified as our ideas change?
I’d offer that we are more creatures of intellect than creatures of habit. Let’s get the right tools to drive more collaboration, automation, and reports that can drive more business insight.
Any great examples of Collaboration-Automation-Reporting you’d like to share that have had a strong impact where you work?
By: Stefan Andreasen 
