Category: Technology

BYOD and Productivity Statistics

Last week I started a discussions about BYOD and Productivity because there are lots of people claiming increased productivity from BYOD.

Global RainbowIntuitively I expect this to be correct. Allowing people to work in a way of their choosing, using a device of their choosing, ought to result in better productivity.

Part of the discussion in my previous post was difficulty in defining what productivity was for many job types, but still there ought to be some statistics to support the declaration of ‘increased productivity’ even if it’s only in some example work types? There are, after all, lots of people already doing it.

Search Google for BYOD increased productivity statistics gets a lot of results (about 42,800,000), so lots to get my teeth into:

BYOD increases productivity, but IT departments need to be prepared – Computer Weekly (2013-08-02):

 “Today’s businesses need a smarter, more mobile approach,” said Fergus Murphy, marketing director, client solution, Dell Europe. “If an organisation wishes to remain in a very competitive market, it needs to open its mind and broaden its perspectives.”

The Evolving Workforce Research report found that nearly 60% of employees feel work would be more enjoyable if they had a say in the technologies they used, while 60% feel they would be more productive with better IT resources.

This news article highlights a report from Dell which isn’t directly linked to, but I think it’s referring to this one. This is a report based on a survey of employees. There is reasonably good evidence in these surveys that people feel more productive in a BYOD context, but are they, what is the evidence for it? I’m always a bit sceptical of drawing conclusions from surveys of people’s perceptions. Perceptions are such a poor measure of reality.

One of the things that I do like about this report is the focus on productivity measures moving beyond being simply a function of hours worked. Hours are such a poor measure of productivity if productivity is a measure of the ratio of inputs and outputs.

The Financial Impact of BYOD – A Model of BYOD’s Benefits to Global Companies (pdf) – Cisco IBSG Horizons

To help companies determine the current and potential value of BYOD, Cisco IBSG conducted a detailed financial analysis of BYOD in six countries. Our findings show that, on average, BYOD is saving companies money and helping their employees become more productive. But the value companies currently derive from BYOD is dwarfed by the gains that would be possible if they were to implement BYOD more strategically.

This report is also, mainly, based on survey material but it also integrates real world experience. It also creates a classification system for quantifying the benefits:

  • In different productivity areas (availability, collaboration, efficiency, new ways of working, avoided distractions, reduced downtime, and reduced administration)
  • At different levels of maturity (no BYOD, basic BYOD, comprehensive BYOD)
  • For different work types (mobile employees moving from corporate devices to BYOD, mobile employees moving from corporate-paid data plans to employee-funded plans, etc.)
  • And different cost pools (software, support and training, etc.)

As highlighted in a previous post we need to be careful with the term BYOD, especially when it comes to productivity, because it’s not primarily about the device:

It is important to note that productivity improvements come from the device and the software, mobile apps, and cloud services used on these devices. BYOD-ers highly value the ability to use the applications and services of their choice, rather than being limited to what their companies offer.

This statement links to an endnote:

The top overall reason for BYOD, “Can get more done with my own device and applications,” combines the attributes “I can get more done with my own device (it’s faster / better / newer)” and “I can get more done with the software / mobile apps.”

These are the overall statistics:

BYOD-ers save an average of 37 minutes per week with BYOD as it is currently implemented in their companies. The United States leads by far in terms of current productivity gains per BYOD user, with 81 minutes per week, followed by the United Kingdom at 51 minutes. In both of these countries, BYOD-ers posted impressive gains by working more efficiently and being more available to their colleagues and managers.

Most of this benefit comes in the form of improved efficiency.

There are a set of workers surveyed who gain significantly higher productivity benefits of more than 4 hours. The report also has some words of caution on productivity as the other end of the spectrum:

One-quarter of current BYOD-ers would rather have a company-issued device. Moreover, percent of BYOD-ers are very unproductive using their own devices for work. These “problem BYOD-ers” average more than four hours in lost time per week due to using their own devices for work. In India, China, and Brazil, about 20 percent of all BYOD-ers are problem users, twice the rate as in the United States, United Kingdom, and Germany. Because they lose so much time using their own devices for work, problem BYOD-ers in these countries have a negative impact on the overall productivity of BYOD.

The area that this report doesn’t really go into, which I find a disappointment, is the impact upon different work types even though it does state that it believes that the greatest value of BYOD will come from Knowledge Workers. The problem with the term Knowledge Worker is that it is such a broad one.

So some real statistics which are based primarily on surveys and hence perceptions, but interesting all the same.

One more to finish of this time:

I couldn’t leave the subject of BYOD without referring to at least one Infographic, of which the most popular one is, by far one from ReadWrite and Intel – here. This states:

74% of IT leaders believe “BYOD can help our employees be more productive”

and

57 minutes – The average amount of time reclaimed per worker per day in an Intel BYOD program

BYOD ProductivityThese two statistics are based on a report by Quest (now Dell) and Intel (pdf).

I’m not going to comment on the Quest (now Dell) report and the 74% figure because I’ve already commented on one Dell report.

Improving Security and Mobility for Personally Owned Devices – Intel February 2012

In this report it states this:

By the end of 2011, about 17,000 employees were using personally owned smart phones at Intel and saving an estimated 57 minutes per day – an annual productivity gain for Intel of 1.6 million hours.

Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be much detail about how Intel came to this figure so it’s not clear whether these benefits were primarily seen by a particular set of work types or whether they encountered any of the concerns raised in the Cisco report.

Also, there’s a bit of a challenge with defining productivity in terms of time gained, because that just leads to the question, time gained to do what?

Like I say, intuitively BYO techniques should lead to improved productivity and there are some interesting productivity statistics to support it, but each one of the has its drawbacks. Why are productivity statistics important though? The reason, personally, that I’m interested is because BYO techniques come with challenges and risks. If you don’t know where the benefits are gained, you don’t know the most appropriate way to overcome the challenges or how to balance the risks. Also, I think it’s important, because if you know where the benefits come from you potentially have the opportunity to innovate beyond where others are already going.

I continue my search.

Evernote Image Search Brilliance

The other day I was searching Evernote when I noticed something really interesting about these highlighted results:

Evernote SearchAnything look interesting to you?

It might help to know that everything below the readwrite and intel symbols is an image and the two highlighted BYOD are in that image. Evernote indexed and allowed me to search the image highlighting where the text was found in the image.

This feature has been around for a long time apparently, but I’ve only just noticed it. How did I not know this?

The reality is, though, I nearly didn’t notice it this time either – it is so seamless. I love technology that just works.

If you want a bit more technical detail then this article might be a good place to start: How Evernote’s Image Recognition Works

Your Life on Code: Million Lines of Code

Your car runs on 100 million lines of code! That’s rich 100 million! But it’s only 50 million for the Large Hadron Collider!

It’s fascinating to think how much of our life is controlled by code. Here’s a wonderful visualisation of it all:

From Information if Beautiful

Business Mobility and the Work/Life Balance Paradox (or Contradiction)

The following is an extract from this report: Next-Generation Knowledge Workers – Accelerating the Disruption in Business Mobility by Cisco:
Jimmy does BlackBerry

The revolution in business mobility is ongoing and constantly changing, and we are in the middle of what we see as a four-stage process (“Forming,” “Storming,” “Norming,” and “Performing”). Each phase has been driven forward by changes in “DNA,” all of which are driving us toward the next phase.

An indication of business mobility’s importance in the current “Storming” phase can be seen in the following: 40 percent of our respondents believe that without their devices, they could not function more than one hour without their jobs being impacted. And approximately 50 percent of mobile-enabled workers have seen productivity gains in the past two years.

As work responsibilities become ever more demanding and time consuming, many people fear an encroachment on their home lives and free time. Looking ahead, our survey respondents see mobile technology becoming increasingly important as they continue the everyday battle to achieve work/life harmony. More than 50 percent see mobile devices as a way to improve their work/life balance.

As for increased freedom and mobility, more than 30 percent of our respondents currently work from home regularly. Another 30 percent expect to be working more from home in the future.

A key element in the juggling of work and life is time. More than 30 percent of our respondents believe that they have been working longer hours; yet more than 40 percent feel they have more control over how, when, and where they work.

I’m sure that these results are what people told Cisco, but what an intriguing set of paradoxical, or even contradictory, views.

Paradox: A seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.

Contradiction: A combination of statements, ideas, or features of a situation that are opposed to one another.

Paradox or contradiction? Mobile business technology enables improvements in productivity, but has facilitated a culture that is dependent upon immediate responses effectively tethering us to our mobile devices. But reactionary working is rarely productive working. Other people propose scheduled periods of disconnection in order to find a place to ‘reset the soul’.

Paradox or contradiction? Mobile business technology has improved our work/life balance, but has facilitated longer working hours from people who believe that they have more control over how, when and where they work. Long working hours are linked to depression, which can’t be good for anyone’s work/life balance, and how real is that control anyway? People regularly speak of manager mis-trust and feeling like they are ‘out of sight – out of mind’. Yet telecommuting is consistently ranked high on people’s list of job requirements with some preferring it over salary.

Walking and Texting – Modus Erraticus

This video from Improv Everywhere made me smile this morning:

If you’ve walked in any public place recently you’ll relate to the challenge. Once upon a time the people who were a menace on the pavement were people walking a bit slower than everyone else. It was relatively easy to negotiate your way around these people because all you had to do was to execute a simple overtake manoeuvre and you were past them.

Over recent years though a new menace has entered our streets, these are the people who are distracted by the little screen in front of them. The problem with these people is not just that they are generally going slower than everyone else, but that they also behave erratically.

My own particular grievance is with those people who are walking along at a pace keeping everything moving, and then they receive a text. There response to this text is an immediate transition into a new mode which means that they can no longer be relied upon to behave like everyone else, they are now in modus erraticus. This is especially annoying when it’s a member of the group of people that you are walking with.

It’s another example of the massive social change that our response to technology is precipitating. Note here that I’m not blaming technology for the problem, but our response to it, although, I do think that there is a balance to make. The design of technology isn’t completely agnostic in these situations, much of our response to technology is automatic and would require a significant amount of retraining to change.

New modes of being plugged-in are on their way that may less social impact, but I suspect that they will still result in attention problems, just different ones.

How to Measure Knowledge Worker Output? Metrics?

What is productivity?

I quite like this definition:

The quality, state, or fact of being able to generate, create, enhance, or bring forth goods and services

Productivity is also a measure in economics; being a ratio of production output to what is required to produce it.

In purely economic terms that’s an easy measure to make – an organisation spends x to produce good that it sells for y meaning that it’s productivity is simply y/x. But that’s really poor measure to use within an organisation or between individuals or teams, especially when the goods and services aren’t monetary in value.

For a long time now the productivity of knowledge workers has been measured by other outputs, the primary one being the document. The measure of cost being the number of hours required to produce it. I’ve worked on numerous projects where the planning process has primarily consisted of repeatedly asking the question “how long will it take to write this xyz report?” The cost of the project being the sum total of the time required to write the documents. The measured output being a set of documents.

But it’s not the document that people want!

A document is simply a way of recording and transferring information. What’s really wanted are the insights, the information, the knowledge.

Using the measure of the document creates all sorts of distortions. The distortion that I regularly come across can be characterised by the phrase “never mind the quality feel the width”. Because it’s the document itself that is being measured then a document it is that will be produced. There is a hidden viewpoint that reasons the size of the document should be proportional to the amount of time spent on it.

Einstein (possibly) once said:

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.

This gets forgotten when time is allocated to a document. I’ve never seen a published hours to pages ratio, but there is a hidden pressure on the author to make the work look credible by providing an appropriate volume of words to support the amount of time spent.

It’s not the number of pages that makes a document more valuable than another, it’s the insight that it contains.

I’m not sure I have too many answers here, but I have been intrigued by people looking to metrics to try and find an answer. The latest has been Chris Dancy now at BMC who has made it his mission to measure all sorts of elements of his life:

Dancy is connected to at least three sensors all day, every day. Sometimes, it’s as much as five. They measure his pulse, his REM sleep, his skin temperature, and more. He also has sensors all over his house. There’s even one on his toilet so he can look for correlations between his bathroom habits and his sleep patterns.

From Wired.

Dancy’s view is interesting:

Soon, Dancy says, companies will start tracking their employees in much the same way he tracks himself. They have no choice. “Enterprise needs new measurements of success for knowledge workers. Today’s knowledge work is measured in really inappropriate ways,” he says.

From Wired.

Dancy doesn’t think that all tracking is necessarily positive, but he’s fatalistic about the future. Even if workers reject more Orwellian surveillance from employers — or companies determine these measures to be counter productive — individual workers will likely use self-tracking to gain a competitive edge.

Perhaps new metrics and “quantified self” are the way forward, but personally that makes me shiver. Most people struggle to adequately compensate for the impact of technology in their life today.

I’m not sure whether I’m ready for this level of immersion but change is on the way, that’s for sure.

We never look up

Following on from my earlier post, We sit on the train and look at our telephones whilst life goes by, someone has put together a beautiful, if somewhat depressing, photoblog of black-and-white snaps.

Check out We never look up it might make you think:

Via Mashable

We sit on the train and look at our telephones whilst life goes by

Last year we averaged 4 hours a day on the Internet, in 2002 it was only 46 minutes.

I, for one, don’t necessarily think that a statistic like that is all good:

We sit on the train and look at our telephones whilst life goes by

Do you need a contract with your smartphone?

A number of sources have covered this story over the last few days:

My initial response on seeing the headlines was that this was some over-protective American parent who had no clue about how the real world worked (in the UK we always assume that stories like this are American). An 18-point contract? Are you mad?

Having read through the contract my opinion has completely reversed (apart from it being American, of course). This is a Mom who has thought a lot about the way that we interact with technology, the Internet, the dangers of being a teenager and the impact of all of those upon us.

If more of us followed more of these rules then many of us would be in a much better place.

Here’s the full list:

1. It is my phone. I bought it. I pay for it. I am loaning it to you. Aren’t I the greatest?

2. I will always know the password.

3. If it rings, answer it. It is a phone. Say hello, use your manners. Do not ever ignore a phone call if the screen reads “Mom” or “Dad”. Not ever.

4. Hand the phone to one of your parents promptly at 7:30pm every school night & every weekend night at 9:00pm. It will be shut off for the night and turned on again at 7:30am. If you would not make a call to someone’s land line, wherein their parents may answer first, then do not call or text. Listen to those instincts and respect other families like we would like to be respected.

5. It does not go to school with you. Have a conversation with the people you text in person. It’s a life skill. *Half days, field trips and after school activities will require special consideration.

6. If it falls into the toilet, smashes on the ground, or vanishes into thin air, you are responsible for the replacement costs or repairs. Mow a lawn, babysit, stash some birthday money. It will happen, you should be prepared.

7. Do not use this technology to lie, fool, or deceive another human being. Do not involve yourself in conversations that are hurtful to others. Be a good friend first or stay the hell out of the crossfire.

8. Do not text, email, or say anything through this device you would not say in person.

9. Do not text, email, or say anything to someone that you would not say out loud with their parents in the room. Censor yourself.

10. No porn. Search the web for information you would openly share with me. If you have a question about anything, ask a person ? preferably me or your father.

11. Turn it off, silence it, put it away in public. Especially in a restaurant, at the movies, or while speaking with another human being. You are not a rude person; do not allow the iPhone to change that.

12. Do not send or receive pictures of your private parts or anyone else’s private parts. Don’t laugh. Someday you will be tempted to do this despite your high intelligence. It is risky and could ruin your teenage/college/adult life. It is always a bad idea. Cyberspace is vast and more powerful than you. And it is hard to make anything of this magnitude disappear — including a bad reputation.

13. Don’t take a zillion pictures and videos. There is no need to document everything. Live your experiences. They will be stored in your memory for eternity.

14. Leave your phone home sometimes and feel safe and secure in that decision. It is not alive or an extension of you. Learn to live without it. Be bigger and more powerful than FOMO — fear of missing out.

15. Download music that is new or classic or different than the millions of your peers that listen to the same exact stuff. Your generation has access to music like never before in history. Take advantage of that gift. Expand your horizons.

16. Play a game with words or puzzles or brain teasers every now and then.

17. Keep your eyes up. See the world happening around you. Stare out a window. Listen to the birds. Take a walk. Talk to a stranger. Wonder without googling.

18. You will mess up. I will take away your phone. We will sit down and talk about it. We will start over again. You & I, we are always learning. I am on your team. We are in this together.

It is my hope that you can agree to these terms. Most of the lessons listed here do not just apply to the iPhone, but to life. You are growing up in a fast and ever changing world. It is exciting and enticing. Keep it simple every chance you get. Trust your powerful mind and giant heart above any machine. I love you. I hope you enjoy your awesome new iPhone. Merry Christmas!

xoxoxo

Mom

How many of these would make it into the contract you would write for yourself?

I particularly liked this one:

14. Leave your phone home sometimes and feel safe and secure in that decision. It is not alive or an extension of you. Learn to live without it. Be bigger and more powerful than FOMO — fear of missing out.

For me the the Christmas and New Year break was an opportunity for another Internet and always-on detox. It felt great to be walking around the Lake District without anything to distract me from taking in the world around me (I didn’t even have a camera as it’s at the repairers).

You might think that a contract is a bit over-the-top but I like the idea, it’s all too easy to let our standards slip over time.

Cisco Connected World Techology Report

Over the last few years Cisco have produced a report on the changing attitude of people to being permanently connected.

This years report – 2012 Cisco Connected World Technology Report – has just been released. The report is based on two surveys, one looking into the attitudes of Gen Y, and the other looking at the attitude of IT Professionals.

At the heart of this year’s study is the smartphone and the constant connectivity it provides to work, entertainment, shopping, and friends. There are 206 bones in the human body, and the smartphone should be considered the 207th bone for Generation Y. They view smartphones as an appendage to their beings — an indispensable part of their lives, and yet they are concerned about data management and Internet security.

Who knew that 43% of British Gen Y always check there smart-phone as part of their morning ritual alongside brushing there teeth? It wasn’t much of a surprise to me having seen how many of them check their smart phone while stood at the latrine at work! The French are far less bothered about such things with only 29% always checking. It’s interesting that women are significantly more driven to be connected with 85% of them being compulsive checkers; it’s only 63% of men.

There’s a fun visualisation that enables you to calculate your data footprint, I apparently have a highly connected lifestyle. As you might expect there’s also a report highlighting some of the statistics and drawing some conclusions along with the seemingly mandatory set of Infographics including an interactive one showing the results for the different countries that took part.

The world is changing fast, there are a lot of people who don’t realise how fast.

My web detox: Rory Cellan-Jones, BBC

The technology correspondent for the BBC, Rory Cellan-Jones, was challenged to a 24 hour detox from the Internet (interestingly for a series titled Lonely London). It’s a really facinating read from someone who is clearly connected for every waking hour.

How does he start his detox, he announces it on twitter of course:

My web detox

Rory then goes on to describe the highs and lows of being disconnected with some really interesting findings.

Having done this type of thing myself I think that Rory’s conclusion is similar to my own experience:

After a few days back online and sometime for reflection, I have come to a rather different conclusion. I now realise that constant connectivity, while vital for my job, has plenty of negative aspects. It shortens your attention span and could prevent you from having any sense of perspective about what is important and what isn’t. So maybe a web detox is something we should all try from time to time.

How do you think you would cope with a 24 hour detox?

Dilbert on Cloudwashing

If you don’t know what cloudwashing is then this probably isn’t relevant to you. if you do know what it is this will make you chuckle: