It has become quite apparent from many business measures that technology is a lever that can improve productivity.  But just throwing technology at a problem will not automatically make things better. In fact, we have seen situations where using technology actually was more expensive than a manual method would have been.

Broadway shows and the theatre in general have been a good source of learning for me, and one of my favorite shows of the past ten years has been Avenue Q. In Avenue Q, Princeton is looking for "his purpose" in life. There is some delightful video animation, a musical number called "Purpose" and much of the plot development revolves around having the "right purpose". We want to encourage you to pick technologies that can meet your personal purpose as well as the business purpose whenever possible. And of course, we prefer those with a high ROI.

To help identify "your purpose" or the key needs to satisfy, identify the top ten items that take most of your time with the most time consuming item listed first. Next identify the top ten items that are important to your business where you can have impact. If possible, these business items should have alignment with the business mission and vision. These items should also align with the business strategic and tactical plans. Finally, identify the top ten items that are important to you with the most important item listed first. Make sure all three groups of ten items are sorted in their appropriate order. Now review the lists, and assess which item deserves the most attention to be solved.

Until we are better at the process, we are initially only going to try to solve a single problem. We know that people that have only one or two goals have over a 90% chance of achieving these goals. If three or four goals are set, then there is only an 70% chance that any one goal will be met, and if five or six goals are set, then there is only a 40% chance of any one goal will be achieved. Having less goals that you are working on at any one time means more focus and more probability of success. The real danger of choosing only one item to fix is that you may not be reflecting on your needs holistically. Your action on the first item may actually make some other area worse, or may not be workable when you go to solve the additional needs. When you are ready to execute your solution, take one last look at your list of thirty needs to make sure that this solution will not cause significant problems in other areas.

Step One - Identify the need that will be solved. For illustration purposes, let's assume that email is consuming most of your time with one, two or more hours used on responding to email every day. You already know that part of the business mission or vision is excellent customer service. One of the business strategies is to communicate with customers regularly, and one of business tactics was to have at least one touch per customer per month. You also realize that email is how you communicate to your extended family and friends, and that you try to answer all of the those emails on the day that they are sent.  This could make email the perfect business problem to solve. We encourage to you pick the most important goal from your list of thirty items to work on first. Notice that up to this point, we really haven't talked too much about the needs or the solutions in technology terms.

Step Two - Identify the issues that cause the need. After reflection, you identify the following issues:

1. You receive more than 200 good email per day that each need a response
2. You receive hundreds and sometimes thousands of junk email or spam
3. Your immediate supervisors demand response in less than one hour
4. You have important clients where your agreed service level requires a response in four hours
5. You have issues finding email from the past that are important

There could be more or less issues that you list, depending on the complexity of the problem being solved. Note at this point we are trying to identify the issues, not solve them. That occurs in the next step. It is helpful to identify all the issues first, and then rearrange them in priority order as well.

Step Three - Identify the strategies that will solve the issues. Now that you have a clearer understanding of the issues, you identify the following as possible solutions. Sometimes other colleagues, IT professionals inside or outside of your organization, managers, and outside consultants or resources are the sources of the solutions. Sometimes you have to create a new solution out of thin air, but that is rarely the case. Note that there are usually dozens of "right" ways to solve a problem and hundreds of "wrong" or dysfunctional ways to solve a problem. Trust your logic and your feelings about what sounds right. Unless the project is very large and you need extensive budgeting and ROI calculations, you can test some solutions and dispose of them for less than you can do legitimate research on the issue. You conclude the solutions to the issues are:

1. Creating standard paragraphs that can quickly be inserted into a reply to a message. Some of these replies can be handled by other staff, administrative people, and outsourced contractors.
2. After research you conclude that you can use spam filter technology like DoubleCheck in conjunction with the junk mail filtering in Outlook and Exchange. You have discovered both the junk mail options and the rules capability in Outlook which not only helps with this problem but the next two issues as well. You will spend time learning how to build rules well since they can serve as a silent assistant for sorting your email.
3. Since both your supervisors and some clients require immediate response, you want to use two strategies. First, you are going to use Outlook rules to sort email from your managers and important clients into an email folder labeled Attention Priority 1 since this folder will be near the top of all folders alphabetically. You are going to sort email from your friends and family into Attention Priority 2. You are going to have the discipline to always look at the these two mailboxes before handling any other email. For further protection, you know you can send alerts to your phone or pager if you receive a priority 1 email.
4. The strategies used for solving the prior issue will be similar for your client response strategy. Additional discipline is needed to always look at client email at least two times per day to meet the service level requirements. The timing can be just before lunch and just before stopping for the day, or first thing in the morning and first thing after lunch. The key is allocating some time in your day for doing these responses, because they are both important and urgent. As a side benefit ,this gives you an opportunity to respond to your family and friends in a timely fashion as well on days when business demands are not so pressing, or daily as part of your normal workflow.
5. You discover that there are now better search options for email in Office 2007, and that you just didn't know they existed. You commit to spend a little time learning how to search better. Additionally, you realize that the way your email folders were organized and named didn't help you on storing email that you wanted to retain. You decide to first reorganize your folders and to be more systemic when creating new folders for clients or projects. You also discover you didn't need as many folders as you used to with the new search capabilities.

Step Four - Implement the strategies that will solve the issues. Now that you have a roadmap for solving the problems, choose the most important one of the strategies and get these done. For email, you conclude that you should:

1. Implement a spam service like DoubleCheck immediately, cutting off thousands of email
2. Attend training on Outlook
3. Spend part of a day reorganizing your folders and naming conventions, much like you have in the past in occasionally reorganizing your office for better efficiency
4. Create the rules in Outlook
5. Write paragraphs carefully as you respond to email so they can be save and become the basis of your standard replies

We used email as the example since many of you have this business issue. But solving complex technology problems can be done just as simply. We have used this method to pick the appropriate amount of technology automation for business analytics, data warehousing, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and accounting system replacements. Simple every day work problems have also been identified that led to using technology like multiple monitors, smartphones, live meeting technology and shared documents with technologies like SharePoint. Like Princeton in Avenue Q, what is your purpose? Once you know your purpose, it is much easier to pick the right technology.