Aussies like their technology at home but not in the office!

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 01 April 2009 14:00

Business IT - Technology

“That’s over $49 billion that Australia loses in productivity as a result of poor software design. Or, worse, it’s an extra 1.2 billion hours a year that Australia’s workforce has to spend in the office,” Fry said.

According to Fry, the sheer number of different applications and the way different office applications work with each other is a prime reason for the losses.
 
“Office workers have to draw information from an ever-increasing range of sources, in a range of different and evolving formats. Yet 53 per cent of office workers say they would find it difficult to take pages of information from a variety of different file formats and combine them into a new document.

“Organisations invest millions on training their employees how to use business software. Yet employees are using Facebook, Myspace, iPhones and digitalising their music without any training at all. By making business software as easy to use as consumer technology, employees are more efficient and less frustrated while companies benefit from lower training costs and higher productivity,” Fry says.

If you want to know how Global Graphics comes to the conclusion that Australia’s loss of productivity is valued at a mammoth $49 billion, here’s the calculation:
• According to the research respondents, on average 106 mins is wasted per working week as a result of difficult to use business software
• That represents 4.6% of the working week (according to the research respondents, the average working week is 38.35 hours)
• Australia’s GDP for 2008 was $1.069tn (estimate from CIA), 4.6% of which is $49,174,000,000 ($49bn)
And, here’s how the 1.2 billion hours wasted a year is calculated:
• According to the research respondents, on average 106 mins is wasted per working week as a result of difficult to use business software
• 106 min x 52 weeks in a year = 5512 mins per year
• Australia has a working population of 14m people (Australian Bureau of Statistics)
• 5512 mins x 14m people in work = 77,168,000,000 mins
• 77,168,000,000/60 = 1,286,100,000 hours