How many times do you think you toggle between applications over the course of your day? For digital workers, bouncing between applications has become an inescapable part of work — hitting Alt-Tab comes as naturally as breathing.
It’s not hard to see how we got here. As business needs evolve, new applications are brought in to address them, and CIOs and managers struggle to retire old ones and keep numbers down. In large organizations, there can be thousands of applications, and smaller ones regularly have tens if not hundreds. As a result, employees spend their days constantly switching from one to another.
Consider an example from a Fortune 500 consumer goods organization we studied. To execute a single supply-chain transaction, each person involved switched about 350 times between 22 different applications and unique websites. Over the course of an average day, that meant a single employee would toggle between apps and windows more than 3,600 times….
This article was written by Rohan Narayana Murty and originally published on hbr.org