The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released new data on workplace productivity that channel organisations can use to understand which industries could use an injection of efficiency-enhancing technology.
The new Estimates of Industry Multifactor Productivity, 2017-18 found overall multifactor productivity (MFP) growth in Australia during 2017-18, albeit with the 0.5 percent increase being the lowest result in five years.
IT infrastructure and applications are designed to improve efficiency and it’s the channel that makes those benefits happen. So the ABS data offers hints on where channel organisations could usefully focus their product development and sales efforts, by showing - in the graph below - industries have gone backwards on productivity.
As the graph shows, productivity is growing nicely in the financial services, professional services and administrative services sectors. Which comes as no surprise: they’re all white collar industries in which IT has been present for a long time, costs of IT tools are falling and collaboration tools have evolved quickly.
The industries in which productivity is in reverse – agriculture and mining, energy, transport, recreation – are often sectors with lesser IT penetration. We know that mining companies have invested in driverless trucks and trains, but (pardon the pun) workers at the coalface aren’t yet heavy IT users. So too agriculture, a field (pardon the pun again, sorry) that remains quite hands-on, is not a heavy IT user.
Change is coming to the backsliding sectors: scarcely a week goes past in which CRN does not hear of mobility offerings to make manual work more efficient, or internet of things tech that offers the chance to measure business processes that can’t be well-managed today.
The ABS data shows those products are well-designed, and that savvy channel players have opportunities to make a bid difference to clients if they can understand how they’ll improve a business.
And that kind of challenge is that the best channel organisations thrive on.
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