As grim and unrelenting as the U.S. economic slump seems, economists continue to see gains in worker productivity and – partly as a result – continued growth in gross domestic product.  In its latest report, for example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor revised upward its productivity growth figures for the third quarter of 2002, and to our mind underscored the opportunity that is now yawning open to providers of productivity-centered software. Here are some highlights from the BLS study:

• Seasonally adjusted annual growth rates of 5.4% in the business sector, 5.1% in the non-farm business sector and 5.5 % in manufacturing

• Increases over the preceding quarter of 5.4% in business, 5.1% in non-farm business, and 5.9% in manufacturing

• Increases over the same quarter a year ago of 5.8% in business, 5.6% in non-farm business, and 5.8% in manufacturing. 

Of course, there is room for debate on the issue of productivity. As David Friedman points out in the January/February issue of Atlantic Monthly (“Jobs & Productivity; One Dimensional Growth”), a significant portion of the vaunted productivity gains of the late 1990s may have resulted simply from the offloading of U.S. manufacturing to low-cost facilities overseas. Further, what looks like productivity to a federal statistician looks very different to a laid-off worker, or to those companies whose products and services he can no longer afford to purchase. 

Nonetheless, almost everyone would now agree that using software applications and – more recently – Web services to link order entry, resource planning, manufacturing, distribution, and billing tends to eliminate duplication of effort and thus improve individual productivity. And we can all agree on what productivity is not:  it is not mere busyness. Increasing the amount of time spent delegating work, preparing for work, or trying to figure out whether the work actually got done, does not in and of itself make us more productive – it usually accomplishes the reverse.

Wanted: Better Tools for Development & Sales-Cycle Management
And there’s the rub. The undisputed gains wrought by IT on the production side of industry – on the factory floor or in the warehouse or loading dock – just haven’t made it to two crucial processes that all modern business enterprises now share: application development and sales-cycle management. 

Enterprises now urgently need to create business-specific software solutions in order to reach new markets and compete in customer service, but the concept of productivity tools for application developers remains almost an oxymoron. 

Sales reps may hit the road armed with PDAs and cell phones, but in the day-to-day work of qualifying leads and closing sales contracts, many find that IT is often as much of an impediment as a strategic weapon. The wireless mobile component of personal and enterprise productivity is only going to increase in importance, and Kinetic Information is in the process of launching a major research program to analyze and measure this very opportunity.

Vendors Heed the Call
What was acceptable when technology was new and everyone had money to spend on it (or thought they did) won’t work today. When it comes to building software solutions and closing sales, software vendors are under pressure to enable “real work” as opposed to “work about doing work.” Fortunately, a number of vendors are responding in exciting – and productive – ways; a few examples follow forthwith:

• Novell Re-brands, Expands Application Development Toolset – Novell’s recently-acquired SilverStream technology is now called exteNd 4.0, but there’s a lot more going on here than a name change. Novell is addressing the demand for service-oriented applications that link people, devices and business processes on the back end. The high-productivity elements of Novell’s “service-oriented architecture” include business-process management, XML integration, and portal services.

• Open Text Acquires “Sales-Readiness” Technology – Open Text Corp. announced this month that it was acquiring Eloquent Inc. and would augment its real-time collaboration platform, LiveLink, with Eloquent technology designed expressly for sales forces. That technology, LaunchForce, manages sales-related content of all types – including video and live events – for delivery via Internet, networked handheld device or CD ROM. Financial services, high-tech manufacturing and insurance are the top target markets.

• Optika Takes the Web Services Plunge – Acorde 3.0, the latest release of Optika’s content-management software, uses Web services to workflow-enable customers’ business applications. The intent is to shorten the time users need to find their own work within a business process and update workflow information. The productivity benefit is improved communication with suppliers, partners and customers. Optika joined the ranks of vendors promising interoperability with both .NET and J2EE.

• SAP Makes Major Interoperability Play – To their many hard-pressed competitors, an agreement between SAP, Microsoft, and IBM may look like another “Axis of Evil,” but for the IT community as whole, SAP’s NetWeaver announcement this month had positive implications. To recap, NetWeaver is an enterprise services architecture heavy on portals and Web services. It supports complex business applications and interoperates with either .NET or J2EE. NetWeaver will be packaged with MySAP and with SAP’s growing suite of cross-functional applications, called xApps. There’s little doubt, therefore, that SAP hopes to use interoperability as a weapon to dominate the ERP market, and none whatever that IBM (Websphere) and Microsoft are going along in order to win and keep enterprise customers.