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A WORKPLACE STRATEGY FOCUSED ON PEOPLE May, 2007--Birmingham Evening Mail Horace Webster, director of Birmingham firm Productivity + examines the importance of technology in the workplace – and looks in particular at the benefits of Microsoft’s Office 2007 software.
As the director of a company providing business solutions, we are always looking for new ways to deliver improvements to our client’s productivity. Technology is the most obvious solution.
We work with a number of clients in the West Midlands region, across a number of different areas including manufacturing, retail and the public sector, each with differing needs. Technology has the unique quality of allowing us to use the same tool with each client but providing each one with a personalised solution.
For some of our clients, our visit is the first time they have been introduced to computer systems and programmes so we need to ensure that when we take them through the features of the technology, they learn to use it to simplify the process rather than complicate it.
The new look and feel of Microsoft Office 2007 displays the menus, commands and options you need, when you need them, making it easier to find and use the features available.
A recent research study by PWC highlighted that too few companies take their people into consideration when structuring their IT infrastructure.
Whilst 78 percent said that people were their most important asset and 91 percent say technology helps people do their job better, only 39 percent have an IT strategy focused on their people. And an alarming 40 per cent focus their IT purely around process optimisation, forgetting the importance of people empowerment and flexibility.
The improved features of Microsoft Office Excel 2007 assist with this ‘empowerment’ by allowing information to be displayed more easily thanks to new tools for filtering and sorting data. The improved Pivot Table and Pivot Chart are much easier to create and enable my clients to format their business results in a professional manner that just wasn’t as simple using Office 2003.
Maintaining customer contact is the basis of all effective business communication and for us and our clients, email is often the man vehicle for communicating.
What Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager provides is new features to handle email and tasks more efficiently, including instant search and a new “To do”list that presents all the information in your calendar, emails to follow up and tasks that need to be done in one list so that you can plan your day just by looking at one list instead of having to look at various diffe4rent sections of Outlook.
Business has always been and always will be about working more efficiently and technology is a key enabler of that goal. Technology can help achieve greater productivity and Microsoft Office 2007 is helping to make it easier for businesses to work better by enabling users to work more efficiently and deliver improved results.
As a report from the Centre for Economic Performance at the London School of Economics in October 2005 found, UK businesses have much to learn from their counterparts in the US in the way they use IT to improve productivity.
The report suggests that the 80 percent performance gap between the two countries is down to the effectiveness with which IT is used. The lesson we have to learn is clear:
Technology empowers people and for that reason businesses must take advantage of the new technology available to ensure they are increasing the productivity of the business and their most important asset – the workforce.
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