You make an important decision about your future of work when you choose your new project collaboration software, CRM system, or social intranet.
When choosing a new work tool, the main focus should be on solving real business problems faced by real people every day in organisations. Recently, new work tools like Podio have empowered users and given them unprecedented access to customize their online experience according to their individual needs.
This shift of power to users has raised some fundamental questions about the role of work technologies, and caused a kind of identity crisis in organisations, as stated by João Baptista, Associate Professor of IS at Warwick Business School in the UK and Benchmarking Associate at the Intranet Benchmarking Forum.
These questions arise when the tools that have been available over the past decades, lag behind new developments in work practices and how people want to work.
“Current systems make assumptions about users’ needs and are more centred around work processes. This emphasis on written processes instead of real working practices by people has often led to spectacular project failures,” says Dr. Baptista, who has followed this industry for over a decade from both research and consulting sides.
Professor João Baptista has consulted several large global organisations as an Associate of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, and has published numerous academic articles as a Associate Professor at Warwick Business School (WBS).
According to Dr. Baptista, the whole information systems industry is at a turning point where it becomes more and more obvious that the tools of yesterday are in serious need of a remake. He is seeing changes in technologies and practices in the organisations that he consults, but he is also testing the potential of new technologies in the courses that he teaches at MBA and MSc levels at WBS.
For example, he has incorporated Podio as part of course assignments to help students learn about new ways of working, and the value and role of these new digital platforms for organisations. One of the main findings is that students, when given the opportunity to design a working environment from scratch, tend to start from the specific to the general, adapting and tinkering with the technology to respond to the day to day needs of groups of employees. They like the flexibility and ability to change the technology rapidly, overall they like to be in control.
However, the reality is that for some time working tools have been disconnected from the day-to-day needs of employees. Even the terminology and lingo that the industry takes for granted is not always assimilated and understood by employees in many organisations. IT departments don’t always work with their colleagues to educate them about concepts that significantly change the logic of their work, such as social media, cloud computing, mobile apps, etc. This is changing with a new generation of employees coming out of universities more literature and more demanding towards the use of new technologies.
To cope with these structural changes, organisations should make a bigger effort to develop tools and applications that respond directly to the specific needs of the people that use them, ideally giving them the ability to customize their own working environments. Transactional processes are needed but should be made easier to use and integrated in an organizational ecosystem that presents information and digital resources consistently to users.
“Empowering users to make their own choices and adapt their working tools to their specific needs is the new frontier of technology development in organisations. This is a paradigm shift in computing where central IT is handing over control to the users within a framework that ensures a consistent and integrated user experience,” says Dr. Baptista.
So which questions should drive the development of your new working tools? Traditionally, you would ask if an information system has this or that feature, but with new work tools we need to start asking different questions…
The following five questions are important to ensure that the tools developed respond to this new paradigm of computing in the future of work:
We believe that Podio provides answers to these questions, but would like to hear from you too. What are the most important questions for you when choosing a work tool?
I like networks; network analysis, social networks, stakeholder networks and how the net works. I'm interested in how the web is changing the essence of work and redefines organizations. At Podio I map, model and redesign processes to find that killer process - or Podio app - that improves the way we work and live.
Podio is an online platform with a new take on work and how it gets done.
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