Bill Gates calls the gap between personal productivity and business application software the "last mile" in productivity. Jyoti Banerjee has been waiting fifteen years for this bridge to be crossed.
I have learned (and continue to learn) a new way of working. Through the use of portable computing, mobile connectivity and the Internet, my working life has been transformed – and so has the organisation of the rest of my life. And I am not alone in this, because every single one of you reading this blog will have a similar story to tell.
However, the organisations we work in, with few exceptions, still work in the same way as they used to ten years ago. Business processes may have got automated along the way, but the engagement between person and process has not changed as much as the changes in personal productivity.
Although I have talked much about this for the past five years, I have felt this was largely a lonely crusade. Frankly, nobody seemed to care much about the gap between person and process.
This week my crusade acquired a very big gun. Bill Gates, no less, speaking at the Convergence 2006 event in Munich, trained his rather punchier firepower on what he calls the “last mile of productivity,” which he describes as the gap between personal productivity software and back-end business systems. Gates’ phraseology may be borrowed from telecoms, and his ambition is certainly shared with every other vendor that has used an Excel link as a fig leaf to paper over the disconnect between personal productivity software and the software that runs the enterprise.
