A recent white paper has found that dealing with document challenges is costing companies millions of dollars each year in lost productivity.
The global survey, conducted by the International Data Corporation (IDC) and sponsored by Adobe in June 2012, focussed on information workers and IT professionals in Australia, the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and Japan. The research found that information workers waste significant amounts of time each week dealing with challenges related to working with documents.
Companies of 1,000 employees found an associated addressable productivity cost estimated at A$15.2 million annually. According to IDC, addressing these time wasters would be equivalent to hiring 213 new employees.
“The compounding complexity of work has never been more pressing. As the number of mobile devices and the use of cloud services surge, information workers must be empowered to work more effectively with documents anywhere, and on any device,” said Melissa Webster, program vice president at IDC.
“They need solutions that enable them to collaborate with others inside and outside the firewall while at the same time meeting IT and organisational requirements for streamlined management, application security, and secure delivery of information – all with a high return on investment.”
Managing director for Adobe Australia and New Zealand, Paul Robson, said addressing security concerns on BYOD could dramatically improve productivity.
“In the digital age people want to use their own devices for work and play, no matter where they are. The challenge for technology developers is to ensure security and integrity is not compromised.”
“At Adobe we’ve made significant developments to our key business product, Acrobat, to address these issues. Acrobat XI includes touch features so people can use tablets with Windows 8 and Apple and Android smartphones, or through Citrix XenApp; Acrobat XI also makes it easier to secure PDFs in Acrobat and Microsoft Office.”
Other key findings in the research:
- One-fifth of the smartphones used by information workers at work, and one third of tablets, are BYOD, increasing business challenges around document security
- Making information workers more productive ‘on the go’ is crucial – half of information workers use a smartphone for work and nearly two-thirds expect to a year from now; one sixth of information workers use a tablet today and a third expect to a year from now – one fifth of information workers in Australia already use a tablet for work today
- Information workers spend nearly half their work week dealing with challenges and frustrations related to working with documents
- The cost of collaboration adds up to seven hours of wasted time each week as organisations manage collaboration across distance, time zones and internal boundaries.
