Office productivity tools and technology are used by business analysts to document information and artifacts.
Office productivity tools and technology are used by business analysts to arrange, analyze, exploit, comprehend, and communicate information clearly.
Using these tools requires being conversant with available resources.
Understanding one software program may give insights into similar abilities or operations in comparable programs.
Additionally, some programs are designed to provide additional tools to other programs or exchange information, such as e-mail or programs that can import/export files.
Many organizations use these tools to learn, store, and distribute information.
Office productivity tools and technology include the following:
1. Word processing and presentation programs: these programs have the ability to present information in the form of a letter, newspaper, poster, research paper, slide presentation, or animations.
Word processors are usually used to develop and maintain requirements documents, allowing considerable control over their formatting and presentation.
Most word processing tools have a reduced ability to document changes and record comments, but are not developed for collaborative authoring, but there are cloud solutions that provide collaborative functionality.
2. Presentation software: these programs are commonly used in the creation of training materials and to present information to arouse discussion among stakeholders.
Some of these applications can be used in a very restricted way to document requirements or create a basic prototype.
3. Spreadsheets: these programs allow mathematical and logical manipulation. They are usually used to manage lists such as requirements, functionalities, actions, issues and defects.
They are also used to capture and execute basic manipulation of numeric data. They could also help with decision analysis, and are very effective at compiling complex scenarios.
They support restricted change tracking and can be shared among multiple users.
4. Communication tools (e-mail and instant messaging programs): these programs are a means of communicating with stakeholders who are distantly located, unavailable for communications or who may need more time for a discussion.
They are usually available to almost all stakeholders and are very easy to use. However, they are generally not effective for long-term storage or the safe keeping of information.
Their primary use is to ease communication over time or distance.
5. Collaboration and knowledge management tools: these tools help in the capturing of knowledge dispensed throughout an organization and make them as broadly available as possible.
They allow documents to be available to an entire team, and support collaboration. They also allow multiple users to work on a document simultaneously, and generally support comments and discussion about document content.
These tools may take the form of document storage, wikis that could easily create and link web pages, discussion forums, cloud services and other web-based tools.
6. Hardware: these tools replicate and distribute information to support communication with stakeholders.
Tools such as printers and digital projectors are usually used to convert digital information created on a computer into easily used physical information.
Examples include photocopiers and scanners which copy physical documents and enable them to be shared electronically.
There are some measures of effective office productivity tools and technology, which include:
- The simplification of processes by analyzing features and functions of tools.
- Appreciation of available tools, their operation, and abilities.
- The ability to decide the tool that will best meet stakeholder needs.
- The ability to communicate the major functionalities of available tools.