IT needs to reinvent itself from being focused on cost-driven initiatives and instead help key employees create higher impact growth objectives that promote business agility through non-routine activities, according to Gartner, Inc.
“Raising productivity by cutting the cost of production time is running out of steam,” said Tom Austin, group vice president and Gartner Fellow. “To increase competitive advantage, organizations need to look for opportunities to increase market impact, including value and agility, by investing in a high-performance workplace.”
High-performance workplace approaches augment the ability of people to perform non-routine tasks that support or facilitate unstructured, exploratory, creative, teaming, leading and learning activities. Gartner is creating a new research focus on the work processes and technologies that enable people to better contribute to the overall success of the enterprise, whether the goal is growth or a need for efficiency. This high-performance workplace research is focused on the unique impact of people on the success of the enterprise and the conditions under which the organization, particularly the IT organization, can enhance their contribution.
As a traditional discipline, IT systemizes and structures. It displaces jobs, even as it creates new industries and new jobs. IT is primarily focused on driving down costs. However, Gartner analysts believe that it is enhancing people’s ability to discover and innovate that drives business.
“IT has been a roadblock to agility, innovation and creativity; it has been anti-creative and anti-collaborative,” Austin explained. “The high-performance workplace is focused on the unstructured, on transformational agility, innovation and creativity without losing sight of structured obligations.”
Five technologies have a significant role in innovation programs. They include content and knowledge base management, expertise location, search and classification, collaboration support and business and competitive intelligence.
“Collectively, these technologies provide information access; relationship mapping across multiple sources of information; patterns and trends information; and tools to allow people to find each other, connect and collaborate,” advised Austin. “The collective benefits of these technologies can be measured as high productivity, increased idea generation and improved relevance and quality innovation program deliverables.”
A high-performance workplace will enhance the structured and unstructured activities that are key to creating competitive advantage, driving long-term, top-line growth and enhancing productivity.
“High-performance workplace strategies raise the impact of skilled people,” Austin said. “Skilled workers earn more and companies want more from them. Ultimately, the returns from augmenting non-routine activities will exceed the returns we’ve seen from automating business applications.”