NEW WORLD OF WORK, NEW WORLD ECONOMY

Corporate employees now spend more time collaborating via e-mails, documents, spreadsheets, and presentations than anything else, and as a result the number of digital assets which have to be stored, managed, shared, and protected each year is increasing. With a faltering economy and fierce competition across all markets and sectors, organisations must now ensure that their collaboration facilities are up-to-scratch, and that staff are employing these tools efficiently, effectively, and securely.

The continued proliferation of digital assets presents something of a challenge for all organisations, as whilst on the one hand businesses and institutions want to foster a culture of information sharing and reuse, on the other there is a growing need for greater levels of control, compliance, and information governance. Now more than ever before, business success and survival will depend upon an organisation’s ability to exploit the information assets it holds and the people it employs.

The ‘new world of work’ clearly relies as much upon unstructured information as it does on structured information, and so as we move through 2009, I expect to see more solution sets which address both of these realms with equal importance. However, weaving together transactional, operational, and ‘transactive’ (pertaining to ‘social memory’) information types is no easy matter, and delivering this both in a timely fashion and a useful format continues to present a very real challenge.

Moreover, information workers must carry out their tasks and duties in a complex and increasingly regulated world, and so CIOs must find new ways to empower the beleaguered workforce without transferring the burden to an already overstretched IT department.

An organisation’s executive management team must, of course, fully understand the corporate business model and the markets in which it competes in order to plot a safe course through the current economic storm; but in my view it is how people think, how they work, and how they are managed that will be the deciding factor. At a time when the ‘new world economy’ is changing everything, business leaders must focus on how to get the most out of their workforce, as this is undoubtedly where salvation lies for most organisations.