Top 10 Technologies replacing the need for extra labour - Jobless recovery

A lot has been said about the economic recovery after the GFC. They (“the experts”) talk about a jobless recovery, i.e. a recovery without extra people or a recovery that may delay for a while the employment of people and hence unemployment will remain high for longer than expected.

“They” point towards a recovery based on increased productivity by maximising the use of technology and delaying the recruitment of staff for as long as possible.

Should that be the case, here are some technologies that are being mentioned representing new ways of maximising productivity for existing workforce:

The top 10 technologies to increase productivity without increasing headcount

1. PDA (Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Mobile PDAs, Palm) – Allow you to work almost 24/7.
2. Laptops – Allow you to work anywhere, anytime and access all the corporate information from everywhere at anytime.
3. Mobile Phones – Accessible for a chat/meeting at any time.
4. GPS – Able to find your customer’s locations much more effectively saving you time.
5. Email – the killer application – be in touch with everyone 24/7
6. Email enhancing systems – allowing enterprise view and archiving of emails – allow the enterprise to have visibility of all emails, documents and interactions with a customer, project or deal with “one enterprise view”
7. Google and all its associated tools (maps, AdWords, Picasa, Earth, etc) – Killer applications on browsers that enhance your productivity tremendously
8. SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions – Allow you to deploy business systems and solutions extremely fast, economically cheap and (for many users) happy of bypassing IT.
9. Microsoft Office Professional with a Browser – taken for granted, the most effective productivity tools ever invented
10. High speed Internet broadband, the highway or infrastructure allowing all of the above, the faster and bigger the better
11. Appropriate and coordinated training on fundamentals rather than just “learn from friends” stuff is much better to get the most of the above productivity solutions and tools.

Top “waste of money” and negative impacting of productivity

• Large BI/data warehouse projects – implementation cost is huge and they are hardly used by users (if project is ever completed)
• Intranets – not needed any more – Google Tool bar, Google tools and the browser does it for free
• Document management systems – who maintain/update them. Becoming outdated very quickly
• Social networking tools (no need to name them – biggest waste of corporate productivity)