Workers Are Drowning in Digital Debt and its Time to Throw Them a Life Raft

Please welcome Jason Cassidy to 21st Century Tech Blog. Jason is the CEO of Shinydocs, a producer of information management software that automates the process of finding, identifying and using the collective knowledge within a business’ data environment.

One of the challenges many businesses face today is form takes precedence over function. Information silos impede the cross-fertilization of good ideas and great solutions across an entire company. To compensate, companies implement even more software with dashboards and scorecards that often turn employees into data entry clerks rather than knowledge workers capable of doing their jobs.

Jason calls this problem digital debt which is an apt name. With this his first contribution to our blog site, I hope you find the information he shares with you of value. As always your comments are welcomed.

COVID-19 changed the nature of work for hundreds of millions. As office towers emptied and organizations came to terms with the permanency of a work-from-home model, businesses needed to give workers the tools to continue to do their jobs effectively.

When knowledge workers got sent home that fateful day in March 2020 across much of the globe in response to public health measures being enacted to protect against the spread of the pandemic, a new way to work was born. And while the work-from-home model was likely to emerge organically as advances in technology made it feasible, the pandemic created a massive remote work experiment.

To make this transition as seamless as possible, employers adopted several communication tactics and data management tools to replicate the in-office environment. These tools included Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Sharepoint, Google Workspace, Slack, Asana and more. 

A recent Gartner survey found that 40% of workers today now use more than 11 types of software tools to do their work, up from 6 in 2019. This is leading to information overload and employees being saddled with digital debt that is impacting their effectiveness on the job. 

According to Microsoft’s recent work trend index annual report, 64% of workers surveyed say they struggle with finding the time and energy to get the job done. Digging deeper, the report reveals that 68% struggle with finding enough uninterrupted focus time during the day, spending much of their time trying to stay on top of the volume of constant communications, searching for information and locating documents needed across the various software application platforms their companies use. This is not a sustainable business model. Not only is it contributing to declines in productivity costing time and money, but also it is stifling creativity and innovation.

Business leaders are feeling the loss with 60% admitting that there is a lack of strategic thinking and breakthrough ideas within their employee teams. It is not that employees don’t have ideas and passion for their work, it is the lack of time in the business day that is stifling strategic visioning and the creation of new ideas and improved processes. That’s why companies need to free employees from the incurred digital debt to begin to unlock productivity and fuel innovation.  

From a risk management perspective freeing them from digital debt will also make the company less vulnerable to system and control failures, regulatory problems, and lawsuits.

When you consider climate change and extreme weather events, these natural disasters require information needed to get the right people at the right time so they can act. Removing the overburden of digital debt means information to service critical infrastructure, such as schematics and maintenance documents is accessible rather than buried in a sea of endless communications or haphazardly saved on one or more information management platforms.

Freeing employees of digital debt while leveraging the ever-growing amount of accumulated data, therefore, should be top of mind for business leaders. Where yesterday’s problems were the managing and securing of critical information, tomorrow’s challenge will be to find ways to use new business tools like artificial intelligence (AI) to extract what’s needed from the knowledge wealth already accumulated within the company.

Workplaces are already beginning to adopt AI technology in areas such as employee recruitment, onboarding, job training, automation of repetitive tasks and information management. The resounding narrative that describes AI as a threat to jobs needs to be seen as a canard, unfounded by the facts. Employees, today, recognize that using AI can help to lift the weight of digital debt off their shoulders. They understand that AI tools can save them time, end information overload, solve search issues, banish busywork and unleash creativity.

That’s why the goal for business leaders today should be to ensure workers have the tools and resources needed to prepare for the AI paradigm shift. The first step they need to take is to ensure that information and knowledge stored throughout their organizations can be found and used effectively. Subsequent steps should include evaluating emerging toolsets and practices, adopting rigorous ethical standards, and reskilling and upskilling workforces to help foster an AI aptitude. That’s because the emergence of AI tools will make fundamental changes to the nature of work. The result will be a vastly enhanced work environment and workers empowered to be creative contributors to the success of the business.