Office of the Future

Is your Harvard MBA staff wasting precious time doing mundane spreadsheet tasks, basic research and data entry work?

It doesn't have to be like that anymore. Welcome to the Office of the Future...

Imagine you could just ship the work to another place and have it take care of itself.

In fact, Pfizer's 10,000 employees now have that choice. Pfizer employees used to spend 20-40% of their time on four basic activities: creating documents, working on spreadsheets, scheduling meetings and doing internet research. People who were hired to create broad strategies and innovate were spending their time navigating Microsoft Office.

The Office of the Future is Pfizer's initiative to literally ship their work abroad - to India. Pfizer employees involved in the pilot test program have an "OOF" (Office of the Future) button in their Microsoft Outlook window to send tasks to a "knowledge processing" firm in India. Once the work is sent, a price quote is provided. The Pfizer team leader decides whether the research is worth the quoted price and then proceeds to approve the transaction.

How does it play out?

The benefits of OOF are unexpected. It's not a time-saver in the sense that employees can knock off at 2:30 p.m. Instead, people do more in a set period. "Rather than spending six months analyzing a segment to understand whether it's a market opportunity," says Nancy Steele, executive director of new business development, "we spend closer to three months." She recently OOFed a four-week research project on the blood-substitute market, which would have bogged her down for months.

The financial benefits are also impressive. "When questions come in, like who are the key players in the stem-cell market, often I would hire external consultants," says Kristin Peck, head of worldwide strategic planning. "OOF does the same work for me at one-tenth the cost. It's sort of mini-internal consulting, for very specific questions." For OOF services, Pfizer pays $15 to $35 per worker hour, far less than they'd pay the McKinseys of the world, whose rates typically start at $215 per hour.

For the full story on OOF click here.