I've written a bit about productivity. The point I made was that it doesn't seem that productivity has uniformly deserted us, but that such improvements are so unevenly spread (OK, so the Harvard Business Review did, actually). It's worth quoting a little further nugget from their article here:
"… the productivity problem isn’t a lack of global innovation. It’s a failure by many firms to adopt new technologies and best practices. Indeed, the main source of the productivity slowdown is not a slowing in the rate of innovation by the most globally advanced firms, but rather a slowing of the pace at which innovations spread throughout the economy: a breakdown of the diffusion machine."
What we seem to be experiencing is a bipolar world where the few zoom off into the distance, powered by the latest Artificial Intelligence (AI) algorithms, seeming to anticipate demand before anyone else, delivering at volume and price, whilst the rest of us struggle to get outlook connected and curse as the printer goes offline for the twentieth time.
The danger for many ambitious firms looking to emulate their leading competitors is that it is difficult to know where to start: you can end up trying to run before you can walk. Before you can dream of being an AI guru, you need to understand its crucial building blocks. No amount of algorithmic goodness will help if Marion from Accounts likes to keep the latest sales spreadsheet on her PC "just in case, so I know where it is", or Geoff from Marketing who likes to run his clients from his phone, as "I know what's going on, and anyway why would I give away my value to the firm?".
If you recognise your company here, then you need to get back to basics. What does that mean? Well, for a start, you need to see your information as separate from your people. Thus the Accounts are different from Marion, the Clients from Geoff. Once you have that in your mind, you can model what you need to know about what. Then (and only then), you can think about the simplest, most accessible systems to house that information. Rent them from the generalist cloud, don't be fooled by vendors' slick nonsense about "sector verticals". Then get people to use those systems, not try to kidnap the information for themselves (for all sorts of reasons, some laudable, most not).
Once you're there, you have a corporate digital heartbeat that you can start to feed into other value-added systems and be the global leader you aspire to. The steps to get there are surprisingly simple, but culturally really hard. Good luck.