2008 and Beyond
As Data Mobility Group nears the end of its sixth year in business, we look back with mixed feelings on what has been accomplished in the world of business. In our opinion, amazing technological achievements have been overshadowed by persistent personnel problems.
Ineffective people management and a lack of high-quality quantitative personnel insight continue to impair every aspect of business, from sales, marketing, and accounting to administration, engineering, and IT. These failings, combined with a misguided focus on technology, are a serious and sometimes fatal impediment to bottom- and top-line growth.
Senior executives and managers continue to seek technological solutions to people problems. Worse, they continue to devote considerable resources to fairly minor technological issues. So they are winning a few battles but losing the war. One need look no further than a typical RFP/RFI containing requirements (especially service level) which are way out of alignment with reality, betraying an ignorance of the forces affecting business performance and the bottom line.
Take, for example, the massive investments in premium hardware and software solutions to provide five-nines availability and lightening-fast service levels for employees. Gary Audin of Delphi, Inc. published a fantastic analysis of five-nines reliability in 2002 titled “Reality Check On Five-Nines.” But even Gary’s analysis failed to compare the cost of achieving five-nines with the daily cost of lost employee productivity. So let’s do that ourselves. Gary calculated 99.999% availability as 5 minutes and 15 seconds of downtime per year, 99.99% as 52 minutes and 36 seconds, 99.9% as 8 hours and 46 minutes, and 99% availability as 87 hours and 40 minutes—a year. But a 2006 Salary.com Survey of more than 2700 professionals revealed that employees waste an average of 1.86 hours per 8-hour work day—that’s 465 hours a year, folks—on such activities as surfing the Internet, socializing, running errands, making personal phone calls, applying for other jobs, and “spacing out.” That figure is more than double the estimate which companies use for compensation planning and it absolutely dwarfs the losses attributable to availability.
The total annual bill for U.S. companies—a staggering $544 billion dollars in lost productivity. Note that the survey’s calculations are based on a conservative average American salary of $35,062 per year, or $16.86 per hour, and that the results do not account for the financial impact of lost productivity beyond unearned compensation (e.g., missed opportunities and lost competitive advantage).
The same comparison of huge losses and paltry gains can be made with technologies such as operating systems and search engines. If a business’s operational efficiency is already poor, paying a premium to shave a few seconds off boot times and search queries is a bit like hot-rodding a pogo stick.
Solving people problems is a lot harder than solving technology problems—that much we concede. However, management must overcome its aversion to facing unpleasant realities and devote at least as much time and energy to solving people issues as it devotes to technology. The positive impact on sales, marketing, and operational efficiencies will go straight to the top and bottom lines.
In the months ahead, Data Mobility Group will continue to discuss storage and information management technologies, but always in the context of their impact on personnel performance. Above technology and information, well-managed talent is a company’s greatest asset. People management is and will continue to be the number one challenge for business—and its greatest risk.
