Johannesburg, 05 Dec 2017
You would be forgiven for thinking that changing the size of the tables in the staff canteen of a company are nothing to do with the digital transformation of the business. Consider this example: the tables in question were in the offices of an online travel agency that was working together with a customer analytics company called Humanyze. The company compiles digital data from mobile devices and sensors to analyse who is talking to whom, where they spend their time and how they talk to one another. The analysis can identify patterns of cooperation that are related to high employee productivity.
Humanyze analysed the staff working at the online travel agency and discovered that the people who ate together were sharing important ideas that made them more productive. Furthermore, the analysis also demonstrated that productivity went up as a function of the number of people sitting at the same table. Humanyze discovered that employees normally ate in groups of four or 12 people. A quick look at the canteen revealed that all of the tables seated either four or 12 people.
This is how the integration of digital technology suggested the idea of increasing the size of the tables in the canteen to have a direct and measurable impact on employee production capacity.
The table story is a powerful example of a key finding: the power of digital technologies (social, mobile, analytic and cloud) does not come from the technology alone, but from how companies incorporate these technologies with a view to transforming their business and how they work.
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