Speed, Technology, Progress does not mean BETTER
GAWNE, SEAN (gawnesm@songs.sce.com)
Fri, 20 Jan 95 09:04:40 PST
A good source for some examples of effective use of IT is the September
19, 1994 issue of Computerworld, a special issue called "Premier 100; The
Productivity Payoff." I think the lessons learned in IT are similar to
what we're seeing in many other management support fields, which is that
we sometimes lost sight of the purpose of the specialized function, which
was to support the broader goals of the organization. But the failures
have not been universal, and despite the fact that many investments have
not paid off, there are some which have paid off tremendously.
As for the speed/technology/progress question, it's not answerable. Each
situation has to be judged on its own merits, and the customers will
usually get just what they are willing to pay for. In a supermarket line,
speed may be important. ATMs enjoyed a period of popularity for their
convenience and availability, but now security is becoming more an issue
so they're being moved to more central locations.
Those who are annoyed at having to deal with phone mail systems, automated
machines, and so forth, are in many cases the same people who objected to
high monthly service charges, etc. When we correspond by this Internet we
delight in saving the charge of postage but how many of us will miss the
daily visits from the friendly postal worker? (Maybe not an issue now, but
wait until you're alone and in your 80s, 90s, or whatever.)
What's the right answer? I don't know if there is one. I work at a large
electric company. Our company will soon begin installing automatic meters,
and phasing out the job of the meter readers. This will affect only a few
hundred people, and it's spread out over years. Nationwide many thousands
are affected. Such examples are increasingly common, and always sad. But
every company must change, because the competitors are changing. The only
alternative is obsolesence.
Maybe the answer is this: yes, these things are progress. There is an
unstated assumption, which is largely false, that progress means better.
Progress simply means new, not always better. Time marches on, the world
changes, and so we must change. Our challenge is to try and learn (how
appropriate for this forum) from the past so that we can at least try to
shape that future for the better. But we are imperfect beings in an
imperfect world, and even our best efforts often fail. Much progress will
not make anything better, some will make things worse. That is simply the
way of things. Given this is not a metaphysics discussion, I'll leave it
at this.
Sean Gawne, Southern California Edison
gawnesm@songs.sce.com
Well written! I had to come out of lurker mode to put my two cents' worth
in.
I just finished a critical analysis for my MIS class on a discussion of
Erik Brynjolfsson's paper (Communications of the ACM, 36:12, pp66-77, Dec
'93) on "The productivity paradox in information technology." The thrust
of the paper is that researchers are having an extremely hard time
measuring _any_ increase in productivity as a result of capital spending on
computers and IT applications, with the possible exception of areas that
are purely data entry-dependent such as transaction processing. The
service sector, which is the business area that has made the largest
investment in IT, has shown a slowdown in productivity by several measures.
The author's contention basically is that the metrics of traditional
productivity measurement may not apply to IT-based investment, but I'm not
so sure. Maybe, as Stever says, faster isn't necessarily better, and more
information may just lead to confusion and chaos without time taken to
digest it. Companies that have given into the unrelenting hype about IT
have spent millions on strategic information systems and have wound up with
very expensive white elephants. CIOs that were heros of the IT profession
have been fired. Could it be that the touted Information Age will take an
unexpected turn because of some inherent limit to the amount of information
processing humans are able to take on?