Raikes Unplugged Part II: Doubling productivity
ZDNet | at | by Mike
Tech Update: In the keynote that Bill Gates gave at Comdex, it seemed as though he set a goal for Microsoft to improve the productivity of its customers. He said, "In the decade ahead, I can predict that we'll provide over twice the productivity improvements we did in the '90s." Can we improve on productivity? Is there really that much room left?
Raikes: The answer is, absolutely yes. But, we'd all admit that it's somewhat difficult to quantify. For example, if you step back to 1990, very few people were using e-mail. Very few people were able to communicate broadly across their organization or to easily collaborate with people outside of their organization. The 1990s brought a significant increase in productivity from being able to connect with people using e-mail. Was it two times or three times, or an order of magnitude? That's difficult to tell. It's the same with the Internet and intranets. Being able to have access to the vast amount of information resources absolutely made a difference in productivity. But it is somewhat difficult to quantify. In some cases, you'll see it's an improvement of 50 percent, and some cases it may be a factor of five.