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How Small Technology Gains Can Lead to Big Productivity Increases

CIO Gary Arstein-Kerslake explains how small technology updates and equipment have benefited the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery.

New technologies that provide small increases in efficiency add up over time and can lead to increased organizational productivity, according to a recently published paper by a state department’s chief information officer.

The four-page paper by Gary Arstein-Kerslake explores how small technology updates and equipment have benefited the California Department of Resources Recycling and Recovery (CalRecycle).

The idea is simple. When employees save time logging into their computers or can easily find information that helps them do their jobs, it frees them up to be more productive at work. And a more productive workforce means a department doesn’t need to hire more people — a concept Arstein-Kerslake said he hopes resonates across government.

“We should be thinking about increasing efficiency and rearranging staff and not just looking at creating more positions,” Arstein-Kerslake told Techwire in an interview.

In his analysis, Arstein-Kerslake concluded that a small 2 percent increase in productivity over 10 years would translate into a 750-employee organization doing the work of more than 900 people. By comparison, the same organization that experiences a 2 percent decrease in productivity would function like a 600-person organization.

At CalRecycle, the IT services branch, led by Arstein-Kerslake, is using technology to achieve those small efficiencies — buying new computer fingerprint scanners and installing new software that allows employees to better communicate and find key information.

With the new fingerprint scanners, for example, workers sign in to their computers more expeditiously than manually typing a password to unlock the computer. While a few seconds saved by one employee may not seem like much, the compounding time saved among hundreds of individuals adds up. And the department earned its return on investment, at $14 per scanner, in just 14 weeks.

“That’s a small thing, but it accelerates across time and allows organizations to be more efficient,” Arstein-Kerslake said.

Likewise, the upgrade to Windows 10 and Microsoft Office 2016 is already making the simple act of sending an email more efficient. A new feature in Outlook lists the newest files when a user wants to send an attachment — no more clicking around to find new files.

CalRecycle has long embraced technology. Since the late 1990s, for example, employees have had the ability to run word searches to find department documents or subject experts. The so-called Enterprise Search capability is similar to an Internet search on a home computer.

A recent two-week survey found that a quarter of CalRecycle’s staff had used the department’s Enterprise Search. And they don’t search work documents for fun — they do it because it adds value to their work, Arstein-Kerslake argues.

“We’re really leveraging the organization’s productivity as opposed to writing a product from scratch,” he said. “When we’re constantly re-creating stuff, that’s not good.”

However, such an indexed repository is surprisingly absent from most state organizations and their employees often need to relearn or re-create documents, Arstein-Kerslake said. Most state organizations have yet to offer Outlook email indexing, and CalRecycle is also the only state entity that has fully implemented Lync/Skype VoIP for instant messaging or staff management, he said.

Arstein-Kerslake said he hopes his paper can show how technology can improve organizational effectiveness.

“In government, we don’t have the mindset of designing systems for efficiency and flexibility,” he said. “When I talk to people about this, their eyes often glaze over.”