Technology’s value to a business derives at least in part from its ability to increase productivity. The 1987 Nobel Prize winning economist Robert Solow demonstrated that technology increases the productivity of both capital and labor to create economic growth.

Some technologies radically reshape productivity. Take, for example, the cotton gin (1792), which fundamentally transformed labor. A quote from Wikipedia claims: “With a cotton gin, in one day a man could remove seed from as much upland cotton as would have previously taken a woman working two months to process at one pound a day.” By profoundly increasing worker productivity, the cotton gin revolutionized both the textile and agricultural industries.

We’re living through several technological revolutions of our own right now – in, for example, cloud services, mobility, and big data. One technology that leverages all three to some extent is the tablet, a device I follow very closely.

Tablets drive worker productivity through a variety of vectors. One of those vectors is portability. In our Forrsights Hardware Survey, we asked IT decision-makers who either support tablets today or plan to support them soon why they would do so. IT decision-makers’ #1 answer, at 62%? Because tablets are a “more portable form factor than the traditional laptop.” This response eclipsed end user preferences, ease of use considerations, and other possible answers.

There are more than 100 new features in Apple’s next version of its Mac operating system, dubbed “Mountain Lion” or Mac OSX. The ones that interest me most are those that advance the notion of post-PC productivity: experiences that help people be productive using multiple modes and devices. In particular, product strategists should pay attention to Apple’s:

• iCloud integration of Docs and Notes. Mountain Lion users will be able to sync notes created in Apple’s Notes app, and documents created in its iWork apps, across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Think of it as Amazon’s Whispersync for productivity. The catch is, though, that the synching is only within the same “app”—so if you create a document in Pages on your Mac, for example, you can sync it through iCloud to a Pages app on your iPad, but iCloud synching wouldn’t be compatible from Pages to another document editing app like Quickoffice. Third-party developers could use the Documents in the Cloud feature, but it would be sandboxed only within their app. This is an interesting twist for the many product strategists developing cloud-synched productivity apps. Evernote, for example, would have less value to users of ONLY Apple devices, since iCloud Notes synching is built into the OS. Evernote’s value proposition, and Quickoffice’s, will now revolve more around the multi-platform use case — users that need access to their stuff across iOS/Mac, Windows, and/or Android. Luckily, this is still a big market: Forrester’s data as of Q4 2011 show that 58% of Mac owners also own at least one PC, and 60% of iPad owners own another type of phone besides iPhone.

Hi all,

My colleague and friend Mike Gualtieri wrote a really interesting blog the other day titled "Agile Software Is A Cop-Out; Here's What's Next." While I am not going to discuss the great conclusions and "next practices" of software (SW) development Mike suggests in that blog, I do want to focus on the assumption he makes about using working SW as a measurement of Agile.

I am currently researching that area and investigating how organizations actually measure the value of Agile SW development (business and IT value). And I am finding that, while organizations aim to deliver working SW, they also define value metrics to measure progress and much more:

• Cycle time (e.g., from concept to production);
• Business value (from number of times a feature is used by clients to impact on sales revenue, etc.);
• Productivity metrics (such as burndown velocity, number of features deployed versus estimated); and last but not least
• Quality metrics (such as defects per sprint/release, etc.).

From its birth as one of the highest-rated track sessions at IT Forum earlier this year to its recent publication as the Forrester report "Best Practices: Building High-Performance Application Development Teams," Jeffrey Hammond's research on the techniques that leading development shops use to drive their success has been wowing application development professionals.

Are you facing this challenge? Are your business stakeholders demanding faster delivery of more innovation? Is the software you deliver increasingly vital to the success of your business? Then you should download the content from this recent event:

Webinar: "Building High-Performance Developer Teams"
Hosted by: Jeffrey Hammond, Principal Analyst, and Mike Gilpin, VP and Research Director
Duration: 1 hour

Click Here To Download...

Description: Replay this Webinar to:

• Learn how to adjust your recruiting practices to attract the right creative professionals for your team.
• Understand what creates an intrinsically motivating culture for developers.
• Discover how best to manage your teams with a streamlined set of Lean software development practices that maximize creative “flow.”
• See what “next practices” are emerging in the most advanced shops to further drive breakthrough performance.

Please listen to our session; Jeffrey and I look forward to the opportunity to share our research with you in the future and to help you apply these learnings in your shop.

Regards,
Mike Gilpin
VP/Research Director
Forrester Research