Wikipedia defines productivity as the ‘measure of output from a (production) process’ , meaning how much stuff you get done.  It also talks about the ‘Productivity Paradox’, which highlights the odd truth that since computers have multiplied and dominated business, we haven’t see a dramatic rise in productivity – we’re outputting the same as we ever did it seems. The author of the article on wikipedia suggests that this could be because computers haven’t introduced particularly new ways of doing things, its just a quicker way of doing it.

I’ve blogged about this before: how the computer is an extension of the office, and uses the same terminology and same processes, and its obvious that if you work the same as you did with a computer as you did without you won’t realise much of a productivity gain.  Moving this into the WebProductive world- of on-line productivity tools, you won’t realise gains here either, unless you address the way you work with the tools available.

What’s needed is a holistic view of your business, and an honest appraisal of the role of IT and particularly the internet and the ‘cloud’ within that.  How can you use the tools available, combining where feasible, streamlining where needed to improve the ‘production line’ of your business? To do this, start with your outputs. What do I ‘do’ with computers, where does that output go, in what form?  Next, consider your inputs. What information is required, where does it come from, what form does it take?

Combining all this knowledge will be difficult, but you’ll get a clearer view of the ‘machine’ in the middle and can maybe make subtle (or maybe not-so-subtle) tweaks to your business workings.