In early June, we hosted an executive lunch for IT leaders across various organisations in Sydney, such as Deloitte, Oracle, News Corp, Knight Frank, and TAFE – to start a dialogue on productivity, after taking on board feedback we received from a survey we conducted with the PDF Association on the common pain points that employees faced day in, day out, when working with documents.
The joint survey informed us that over 80% of workers lose time each day on document collaboration issues, with 3.5 hours spent filing and organizing documents, and 5 hours spent on searching for documents. So, with a room full of great IT minds, we put this question to them: what’s holding back businesses from providing employees with some relief? Their responses gave an insight into the challenges that even the most forward-thinking tech leaders find themselves grappling with.
- In with the new, out with the old
Even the most progressive of organisations sometimes lack the vision to make the necessary changes to improve productivity, especially if they do not have the right IT team in place to make the best decisions. Modern technology leaders believe in the transformative powers of partnerships to help organisations work smarter. There is nothing more frustrating to these leaders than witnessing legacy teams stubbornly cling on to unproductive, old-fashioned ways of managing IT just because “that’s how things have always been done.”
- Re-thinking productivity
A common challenge that had the IT leaders nodding their heads in agreement was how difficult it was to change habits that are accepted as the norm in the workplace. Be it a proposed transition from storing paper documents physically in the office, to storing it in the cloud – breaking the old habit of print-scan-save can be tough. With new technology available to paper-driven businesses today, it is often unnecessary and wasteful to print and scan documents in the volumes that many workers have grown accustomed to.
With the average office worker in Australia wasting 10,000 sheets of A4 paper a year, of which half goes into landfill, implementing a document productivity strategy is not only the smart way to do business, it also is the ethical way.
- Building a culture of innovation
More often than not, it is the ability to take stakeholders on the journey that drags the process of implementing new IT ideas – from resistance by end-users to adopt new technologies, to a leadership team that may be too short-sighted to see the long-term benefits of investing in new IT infrastructure. We believe that IT decisions must make sense to the bottom line: if an innovation is proven to reduce the turnaround on sales contracts to minutes rather than days, then it’s obviously a no-brainer.
The hour-long lunch ended on a high, with many leaders encouraged to re-think the way they view productivity, and no doubt buoyed by the delightful service and beautiful desserts laid out by the restaurant, Rockpool Est. 1989.
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Leaders Lunch Sydney is part of an ongoing global series of CXO events that Nitro is hosting throughout the year. To express your interest in upcoming Leader events, drop us a note here.