About "cloud productivity"

Productivity is an economic term aiming at measuring the efficiency of production. In a very generic form, productivity is a measure that describes the ratio between input and output in a production process, eg. measuring what can be produced by an hour of work. 

For the knowledge driven economy of today, it is quite difficult, to determine productivity like we did while measuring the productivity of an assembly line. In the knowledge economy, information is used as input and information is the produced output. You can´t measure information by pieces or by the hour, so measuring the result of an added unit of information in terms of the created units of information does not make much sense - the cloud is not an assembly line. 

 

For the knowledge worker, the cloud supports three main "production" steps: 

Having this in mind helps, to understand the idea behind Refinder. Being a tool for knowledge workers, which itself lives in the cloud, Refinder supports these three production steps of the knowledge worker. Improving these three steps improves productivity.

 

For the "information access" step, Refinder caters in multiple ways. The very basic approach is, to connect to as many information sources from the cloud as possible. This connectivity comes along through ready-made integrations with widespread information repositories, e.g. the Dropbox and Google Docs connector, the import of RSS feeds and Tweets. Beyond that, Refinder hooks into external information services like DBpedia or Google Search, to enhance information access with contextually relevant content recommendations.

On a second level, information access is bolstered by connecting with other workers and the sharing of information in jointly used information collections. 

As Refinder is used, it turns into an information source by itself. In this capability, Refinder makes a third level of information access functionality available, which allows for targeted search and serendipitous information discovery (the spotting of "unexpected relevancy"). 

 

In the step "process and refine information", Refinder assembles a range of tools. Classification and annotation of information is achieved through Refinder´s concept of "thing types" and convenient means for tagging (respectively relating) of information.  

Communication utilities like commenting and liking are instrumental for collaborative purposes. Filtering helps, to condense large arrays of information into meaningful and related clusters of information. 

 

Finally Refinder is the conduit for "information delivery and presentation", preferably through its collections, containing thematically curated information and through its activity stream, presenting information and work artifacts in chronological order.

 

In the knowledge economy, productivity turns from a quantitative into a qualitative measure.  Sure, you can gauge various time savings achieved through cloud-based ubiquity of information. But in terms of "cloud productivity", i believe it is the quality fallout, that counts most for the knowledge worker.