Get in the ‘Flow’; A New Model For Productivity
How cognitive systems are set to impact the way we’ll work
A focus on productivity — that is one thing we all share in the workplace. Whether you are a cashier staring down a line of increasingly frustrated customers, or a knowledge worker trying to deliver a complex project for a big client, we are all focusing on productivity.
And yet, when you break it down, productivity is under attack on many fronts. Employees report wasting over 8 hours per week searching for people they need to perform their jobs, and they waste 7 more hours looking for information. If you run a business, you have no doubt experienced the productivity problem — acutely.
Productivity systems like e-mail and intranets try to help. There is however, an inherent paradox in many of our present systems. They can actually be a forceful barrier to just the kind of productivity we are trying to create. They can take us out of the moment. How many times have you been distracted by your inbox just as you were getting into your creative groove? Or had a great collaboration session get prematurely cut short by a colleague raising the lid of a laptop?
Cognitive systems to the rescue. The application of artificial intelligence to productivity systems can help them be just that. Cognitive systems can augment productivity by presenting the right information, at exactly the right moment it’s needed, in a format that is completely conducive to helping you get your job done.
As an example, at an event in San Francisco, Jim Anderson III from workplaceON described their work with a number of colleges across the globe, to create an intelligent assistant for students. The assistant can help them with everything from making sure assignments are completed on time, to organizing a get-together for the tennis team.
These systems can capture all the conversations that happens around an organization, parse through it to understand the context, and sense when is the best time to present the correct information. At the same event in the his keynote, Inhi Cho, General Manager IBM Collaboration Solutions, talked about “purposeful environments”. This is the polar opposite of the filing cabinets that still adorn many an office space, and even present silo-ed systems; there’s loads of knowledge in there, but it can be a devil to find that nugget you need at just the right moment. We’re entering an age where systems can understand what we’re doing, reason from it by forming hypotheses, learn from the world around it, and interact with us in more human ways.
Look how Woodside Energy uses cognitive power, to give engineers on oil platforms a conversation service which reads, understands and delivers pertinent information to engineers — from millions of pages of engineering reports. And, does that all via an iPad, slipped under the arm of an engineer as he wanders his rig.
Rather than having to spend time chasing information or taking you out of your groove, these systems introduce a new productivity — the ‘flow’. Imagine what you could achieve if a cognitive assistant followed you around all day, pro-actively giving you the information you need to be productive — even before you knew you needed it?! Sounds great to me. Re-think your work, apply cognitive wherever it will augment your human power — and get in the flow!
