Welcome to the Next-Generation Workplace

A new breed of workplace applications focuses on what makes an organiZation unique: its people, says Andy Bailey, VP of Marketing

This might sound strange coming from the head of marketing at a software company. But everything in the current economic climate indicates that it’s not the routine business processes – and making these work faster and more efficiently – that delivers competitive advantage anymore. What matters in our knowledge economy are people and the value creation captured in their intellectual capital, experience and actions.

The search for global talent is indicative of the importance now placed on human-driven activities. According to consultants at McKinsey, "high-value decision makers are growing in number and importance throughout many companies." It points out that during the past six years, the number of US jobs that include 'tacit interactions' – complex interactions that require a high level of judgment and experience – as an essential component have been growing two and a half times faster than the number of 'transactional' (or routine) jobs, and three times faster than employment in the entire national economy.

In the software industry, the focus has traditionally been on automating transactional interactions – definable and well-understood business processes that can be cost-quantifiable, modeled and analyzed. The end goal has ultimately been efficiency: reducing costs and systemizing best practices through automation.

But process-driven activities are not the only activities that take place inside an organization; more importantly, they are not the most vital either. The innovative agile business is one that focuses on its people: harnessing their knowledge and drawing on their experience to stand out from the crowd.

We’re not the only ones that think this. Tom Austin from research house, Gartner has written: "You’ll never be able to cut costs or increase productivity enough to become truly agile. A high-performance workplace strategy calls for more focus on enhancing people’s ability to do non-routine, to foster productive exploration, innovation, discovery and initial execution."

People-driven activities – otherwise known as ‘management actions’ – are what give one company a lead over its competitors. But these actions are typically not process-led or structured and, as such, cannot be improved through automation or systemization. Indeed, some technologies have had a negative effect on people’s effectiveness, if we take email overload as a classic example.

Management actions require a high degree of interaction and collaboration; they rely on expertise, knowledge and cognitive skills locked inside people’s heads. The demands people place on applications is different too – they want immediate communications, collaboration and tools that improve their personal productivity. Software can only assist with these activities, not automate them.

This has given rise to a new breed of software applications designed to enable people to collaborate more easily and gain immediate access to information that helps them make decisions faster. These workplace applications focus on improving the people-driven activities within an organization.

Workplace applications are deemed by many to be the next big wave in software applications. Focused on high performance management, they promise to improve the activities carried out by individuals, enable better communication and collaboration, capture experience and knowledge, and ensure laser focus on problematic and exceptional issues.

Such applications bring together the standard tools of the knowledge worker: search, data access, business intelligence, collaboration, messaging and knowledge management. Essentially, workplace applications are comprised of four components:

The way high-value knowledge workers and business managers work today relies on constant ‘context-switching’ – alternating between business issues, exceptions and projects that make up their areas of responsibility and alternating between many technologies, applications and communications devices.

According to Mark Levitt, Vice President for Collaborative Computing and the Enterprise Workplace at IDC, "We expect business users to push for Web 2.0 mashups for workplace applications in the coming year, and business and IT management will need to embrace this enthusiasm for combining multiple sources of information on a single screen while keeping poorly designed or poorly managed mashups from turning into crashups."

Recognizing that it is people, not IT, that are the source of real corporate innovation and agility, we developed Attunity InFocus, the industry’s first platform for deploying and managing workplace applications. InFocus brings together the collaboration technologies and information – whether emails, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets or unstructured Web data – to solve a specific problem or achieve a corporate goal.

The results are dramatically improved key worker collaboration and effectiveness in managing business problems, exceptions, new initiatives and the non-routine. Projects can be more easily managed by having greater visibility and people can be more flexible in reacting to change.

To find out more, please contact us at contact_us