Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[Interview with IDC]
Hi. I'm Ali Hanyaloglu from the Acrobat Solutions team at Adobe.
[Ali Hanyaloglu - Senior Marketing Manager Acrobat Solutions, Adobe]
IDC, on behalf of Adobe, recently conducted a study on the productivity challenges
of information workers and how IT professionals can help address those.
I've asked the lead analyst and author, Melissa Webster,
Vice President of Content and Digital Media Technologies at IDC,
to join me today to answer a few questions.
Thanks for coming in, Melissa. >>Nice to be here, Ali.
So this white paper is intended for IT professionals in a strategic role.
Tell me, if I'm an IT professional, why should I care about this study?
Organizations are being asked to do more with less these days,
[Melissa Webster - VP Content and Digital Media Technologies, IDC]
and they really need to free up budget for innovation.
So one of the things this study does is provide some actionable insights for IT
to help them do that.
So Melissa, I have to ask, were there any findings that surprised you?
Yes.
We were very surprised at just how much time information workers spend
working with documents, and the challenges they face working with documents
are a much bigger factor on their overall productivity than we realized.
We've been doing information worker productivity studies for years,
and so I think these findings really give IT some real opportunities to make a difference.
The study talks about a perception gap between information workers and IT professionals
when it comes to their current and future needs.
Tell us about this gap.
Actually, there are a few gaps.
There's a disconnect between information workers and IT
when it comes to collaboration, especially collaboration with people
who are in remote locations or with external collaborators.
And then there's a gap around mobile.
About 2/3 of information workers expect to be using mobile devices a year from now,
and that's a little ahead of IT's expectations.
Why do we have these gaps then?
And how is the nature of information work different today?
I think the whole consumerization of IT trend is having a big impact.
Users' expectations are really changing.
For one thing, they want to be able to share information easily with people
inside and outside the firewall.
And where IT doesn't provide tools for this, they're happy to go off on their own
and find SAS services and make use of those to solve their own productivity problems.
And then for the other, they really want to use the devices that they use every day:
their iPhones, their Android smartphones, their iPads.
They feel that those devices make them more productive.
So that's of course inspiring the whole BYOD trend,
bring your own device to work,
and that in turn is causing IT to make a big shift away from managing devices
to managing the information and the applications on those devices.
So IT has been implementing collaboration platforms and tools already.
Why aren't they addressing the productivity needs of these information workers?
Well, we're not saying that those investments in collaboration tools haven't paid off.
They certainly have.
But what we are saying is that information workers spend a lot of their day
working with documents, and they're wasting a lot of time in those document-related activities
around creating and managing documents, around review and approval,
around editing and revising.
So what we're saying is there is a need for improved productivity
around document-based collaboration.
What are some of the specific ways that information workers are wasting time?
They spend hours each week searching for documents they can't find
and then recreating the documents they couldn't find.
They spend more time dealing with unraveling version control issues
that arise from poor edit and review processes
or pulling comments together from multiple reviewers into a new document
and pulling data from forms together.
These are all areas that really cry for better automation and better tooling.
Talk to me about mobile.
What kinds of tasks do information workers say they need to do
in order to be productive on their devices?
After email and calendar, it's really about working with documents.
So no sooner do they have email and calendar access but back they come to IT
asking for ways to be able to open those email attachments and view them.
And once they have access to that, they need to be able to open them
and then comment on them and annotate them
and send those revisions back to someone else as an email attachment.
And then they realize they need to be able to open and view some of their own documents
and send those to someone else.
So pretty much all the document activities they perform today on their PCs
are things they want to do from their mobile devices.
This is a global study. Were there any major differences across the regions?
There were.
Interestingly, the United States is further ahead in the use of SAS productivity tools
and also use of mobile devices.
And bring your own device to work, the BYOD trend,
is more established in the United States too.
France and Germany are further ahead
when it comes to using advanced document security technologies
like digital certificates or digital rights management.
And then in Japan where the hanko or wet stamp is used to sign,
they use a lot more paper.
Okay, Melissa, 1 final question for you.
What 1 thing should an IT professional do after reading the white paper?
IT should go and engage with users to assess the perception gaps in their organization
and identify where the time wasters are for end users.
A good place to start would be to look at our list of user needs and challenges
related to working with documents.
Better use of the PDF standard could help here.
And we think IT can make a significant difference with modest investment.
Great, Melissa. Thank you so much for coming in and talking to us about the study.
Really do appreciate it. >>My pleasure, Ali.
If you would like to download and read the white paper for yourself,
you can do so for free from the Adobe Acrobat IT pages at Adobe.com.
Thanks so much for joining us.
[Adobe]
