News Feature

Big Offices Increase Productivity

By Tom Davenport

September 01, 2003 — CIO — It’s pretty common to beat up on IT organizations for one reason or another. Yet when it comes to knowledge worker productivity and effectiveness, some IT people—particularly programmers—are the poster children of knowledge workerdom. In fact, some of the practices employed in IT are considered state of the art in enhancing knowledge work.

IT organizations are among the only knowledge work institutions on earth to measure productivity and processes, reuse assets, work collaboratively across organizations, and experiment widely with new approaches. IT’s use of these approaches doesn’t necessarily mean that productivity is higher than that of all other knowledge-intensive professions—and, of course, it’s hard to compare across different types of work—but I think it’s fair to say that IT is doing better than most.

Take measurement, for example. As the clich¿oes, if you can’t measure IT productivity, you can’t manage it. There are two domains in which IT measurement is relatively advanced: programming, and IT processes and capabilities. In programming, some organizations have measured for decades the production of either lines of code or function points, and various researchers have analyzed the considerable variance in productivity. These measures aren’t perfect, but they have allowed us to begin to understand differences across individuals. How many times have you heard that the best programmer is 10 times as productive as the worst? We may not know exactly how to bring everybody up to that high level, but we at least know the degree of variation—something that lawyers, doctors and (executive) chiefs can’t measure nearly as well. By the way, one of my other favorite research findings is that programmers with bigger offices are more productive. Feel free to try that one out on your boss.

The other primary domain of measurement is the assessment of IT processes, particularly software engineering (but also software acquisition, people management and the development of software-intensive products). Thanks to the Software Engineering Institute and researcher Watts Humphrey, we have an international standard for the quality of software engineering: the Capability Maturity Models. You’ve probably heard of these five-level models, against which thousands of organizations have been assessed (if you haven’t, check out the CMM link at www.cio.com/printlinks). CMMs have been enormously influential in the offshore movement of software development to places such as India and China. The fact that there are many organizations certified at the top Level 5 CMM in India—more than twice as many as in the United States, unfortunately—has led many companies to send work offshore with confidence (see our outsourcing special report starting on Page 44). There is no similar global standard for other forms of knowledge work capability, unless you count the ISO 9000 family of standards for manufacturing quality. Of course, the availability of a global standard cuts both ways: It means that knowledge work will flow to where it is best and most cheaply done, and that may well be outside your company or country. But it’s a great yardstick if you want to get better.