IMPROVING THE WAY YOU WORK
Enhancements in Attunity InFocus 2.2 make it easier for management and knowledge workers to deliver business value, says Andy Bailey
With most organizations reaching a plateau in the number of transactional, routine activities they can automate to make efficiency gains, many are turning their attention to the more complicated non-routine activities and questioning how they can use technology to improve the way these high value activities are carried out.
The market for workplace applications – which focus on helping knowledge workers and senior management improve the way they work – is steadily growing. Workplace applications focus on improving the people-driven or non-routine activities of an organization – such as the process exceptions, new business initiatives and other strategies they carry out – which are key to any organization’s future success.
With this in mind, we have made some important enhancements to the four ‘pillars’ behind workplace applications (see below) as part of Attunity InFocus 2.2:
- Information access, search and correlation
- Collaborative, social and participatory working
- Knowledge, history and learning
- Speed, configurability and productivity
Keeping information in context
In order to manage issues, exceptions or to introduce a new initiative most people investigate a variety of data sources – whether Word files, PDFs, Web pages, emails and so on. The challenge they then have is keeping all this information in context of the activity that they’re working on at a particular time. With so much information at people’s fingertips, it’s difficult to keep track of the information gathered for each task, and conducting a fresh search each time is a waste of resources.
Version 2.2 of Attunity InFocus improves information access by making it easier for managers to associate and access files and documents in new ways. For example, rules enable users to search for relevant files on the corporate network relevant to their focus area, without having to conduct the same search every time. Information from Excel files can also be extracted and presented in forms or table views, or even used to trigger alert notifications. Managers and knowledge workers can now spend their valuable time assessing, acting on and monitoring instead of searching, gathering and deciphering.
Instant collaboration
Teamworking is not just a buzzword; for most organizations it’s the joint team efforts that deliver the ‘eureka’ moment or, on a more mundane level, ensure a job is completed to a high standard quickly. Collaboration, collective intelligence and shared content creation, commonly referred to as ‘social networking computing’ is all the rage on the world-wide web, but it has its roots in business. Focused communication and participatory working enables issues to be resolved faster and more rigorously. To enable teamworking, however, requires a knowledge of who is available (known as presence), and the mean to communicate and collaborate with in real time, whenever they need to be in touch.
With version 2.2 of Attunity InFocus, we have added features to support real-time collaboration and improve teamwork productivity. Enhancements include a list of team members working on a task together, so that users know how to contact a colleague or can view their team interactions so far. We have also added presence capabilities, so that colleagues can see when other team members are online and conduct instant message conversations in real time.
With more and more work being done remotely and across multiple locations, Attunity is committed to facilitating the collaboration that enables management to work together and effectively drive the organization forward.
Learning from experience
Past experience, knowledge and history play a valuable role in determining how we do activities today or in the future. This is why we’ve improved visibility and learning capabilities in the capture information within the Journal feature of Attunity InFocus 2.2, so users can learn from past activities more effectively.
InFocus provides innovative technologies for saving point-in-time information into a snapshot available for reference at any time, and a Journal that organizes such snapshots correlated with an activity trail along a timeline. These technologies provide a unique and powerful foundation for personal, team and corporate learning, as past experience is captured and structured for quick and easy reference. Eliminate the wasted time spent trying to find supporting documentation or trying to recreate a past situation that has arisen again. With InFocus, you can now quickly find and reference past decisions and actions to support effective and efficient decision making.
Version 2.2 includes a new ‘Journal view’, which makes it easier to sort, filter and group Journal entries. This will help organizations improve tracking, audit and learning of corporate activities over time.
The need for speed
The pace of working has sped up – assisted by real-time communications and new technologies – and organizations want to plan, make and deliver products and services faster than ever before.
Aware of the need for speed, we have enhanced InFocus Designers, the set of tools that enable the rapid delivery of workplace applications. For example, we now offer an integrated tool through InFocus Designer Studio, which brings together all designers in the same environment, making it easier for solution builders to design, configure and refine a workplace application.
There are other tools designed to increase the pace of development further, such as new wizards that make it quicker to define information records and map them into business views, and a Query Designer, which helps developers with the authoring of database queries and simplifies their implementation.
Unleashing the value within your organization
These enhancements to Attunity InFocus 2.2 improve the way managers and knowledge workers carry out the activities that consume their day -– addressing issues, monitoring key areas, making decisions, putting out fires and identifying opportunities. The time has come to help these highly valued workers be more effective in performing their daily jobs. Attunity InFocus is rapidly designed and configured for specific business issues and priorities. We design in days and deliver in weeks. With so much corporate IP invested in these key assets, isn’t it time to invest in a solution that will benefit them and your organization? Attunity InFocus is enabling other leading companies to improve their corporate agility, lower their operating costs and minimize operational risk.
So what are you waiting for?
To find out more, contact marketing@attunity.com