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168 Managing Customers Through Economic Cycles

As companies evolve their competencies on the road to
mastery, their productivity rises significantly because the
amount of time spent in control, waiting, seeking, mail,
and administration become less. A typical organization’s
allocation of time spent evolved to significantly higher
value-added work time as Figure 7.12 depicts.

Information masters do more with
less – Work Value

One of the most compelling but least talked about areas of
information mastery is the ability of organizations to sup-
plant workers. It has long been thought that the age of
automation was over. “We have automated all the things we
were able to with technology” is a belief often verbalized.
We did that in the 60s and 70s. In fact, information mastery
gives us another level of automation. Companies have found
that the employee time and resources required to find,
extract, understand, and apply information for business in
their current information environment is many times more
than that in a near mastery organization.

“Faster, better, cheaper” can only be successfully applied
when a organization is on the road to mastery. One
organization found that after automation, most of their
marketing workforce could be redeployed or reduced.

One leading US investment banking organization found
that they could redeploy roughly 45% of their corporate staff
in marketing, sales, and service because the time required
to complete activities was significantly reduced under higher
information competency.

Many companies who have not had first hand experience
with the impacts on efficiency are skeptical of the tremen-
dous productivity improvements. Disbelievers are quickly
convinced once they see the operational changes a systemic
information competency has on an employee’s time spent in