Category Archives for "The Challenge"

Social Productivity and Information

Several years ago, McKinsey & Company studied how well companies used social technologies to help raise the productivity of high-skill knowledge workers.  The realm was untapped, McKinsey said, and concluded that:

If social technologies were properly harnessed in a way to help business workers deal with information, they could raise productivity by 25% and could contribute up to $1.3 trillion dollars worth of value to US companies.

It never happened.  Entire categories of new tools were developed, but not one of them combined social technology, information, and connectivity.  The number of workers who must deal with complex information in the workplace has risen, but no tools have been developed that focus on collaboration and sharing of connected information.  Until now.  

Why not?

It turns out that supporting business information is very difficult.  Business information comes in all shapes and sizes, and is consumed and distributed by all different sorts of people.  In the past, many companies invested in big, corporation-wide information systems. Other companies set up systems that were full of rules, and hired managers to make sure that workers were being consistent.  But that’s not what workers are looking for today.

Today’s workers spend their off-hours involved in sophisticated communication and information-sharing activities, with state-of-the-art tools.  They aren’t afraid to use their consumer tools in the workplace — and they don’t hesitate to ask for the types of functions that they get from their consumer tools.

Memphis offers a powerful solution for business information that fits the modern worker’s needs and working patterns.

Life Has Changed

Hey! Where’s your phone?  

Because nobody in today’s world is ever without their telephone.

Our phones connect us instantly to any resource in the world: people, services, documents, movies, podcasts, messages. More information than we can imagine, right there at our fingertips.

This level of instant connectivity (raw information power!) is new territory for all of us, and we’re still figuring out how to fit it into our lives.

The consumer information sharing services that we use daily have created more than $1 trillion in market value, and revolutionized how we communicate with friends and family. We now expect —and get— connection, feedback, and discovery every time we lift our phones from the table. 

But what about our professional lives? Have you noticed that it’s actually gotten harder? Business services don’t talk with one another, and workers all over the world complain that they have to take up the slack. Things don’t just … work. And the information just keeps growing.

We’ve seen messaging move from being personal into business, with great success.  And now, workers are ready for more tools that support modern collaboration patterns in our all-digital workplace.

It’s time to bring social patterns to productivity, and to seamlessly connect content, services, and people together in an engaging, revolutionary way.