Computers make us more productive. Do they also slow us down?
In the spring of 1994, I wiped the game Civilization off my office computer. I wiped it off my home PC. I wiped it off my laptop. I threw away the original disks on which it had come. It was clear to me that I had a choice: I could either have Civilization on my computers, or I could be a deputy assistant secretary of the US Treasury. I could not do both. It wasn't that my boss ordered me to - she herself played a mean game of computer solitaire. In this, I was the boss, and I had decided that with Civilization on DeLong's hard disk, DeLong's productivity would be unacceptably low.
Computers are tremendous labor-saving devices. They give us power to accomplish extraordinary amounts of work in extraordinarily short intervals of time: financial analysis, data mining, design automation. But they also give us the capability to do things like play solitaire. Or send instant messages. Fiddle with fonts. Futz with PowerPoint. Twiddle with images. Reconfigure link rollovers.
At the organizational level, however, the uses of high tech that might be valuable for an individual can be pointless or counterproductive. Consider a meeting to decide between two courses of action. Often, the same decision would be made whether weeks were spent preparing overheads or no overheads were prepared at all. It's easy to see that, from the company's point of view, all the hours spent on PowerPoint slides are dissipated waste.
Now, I don't want to say that computers and communications haven't increased productivity. They have. They've tripled the underlying rate of productivity growth since the bad old days of the Carter, Reagan, and Bush Sr. economies. Large investments in computers and communications seem necessary for rapid, industry-level productivity growth. Still, there is a strong sense that computers are less of an asset to the economy than they might be if we truly knew what they were good for and how to use them.
McKinsey and its brethren tell horror stories of companies investing heavily in computers that were of no more use than doorstops: Kmart applied computers everywhere except in preparing to handle fluctuating sales volumes; automated check-imaging systems wound up saving banks neither time nor money. (McKinsey will also tell you that the best way to avoid such organizational dysfunction is - surprise! - to hire McKinsey.)
Meanwhile, we are a long way from the old-fashioned version of white-collar control, where you sat at your desk and either stared into space or did your work. Most often you stared, until you got so bored that your work seemed interesting. Today, white-collar workers want to use their machines to be more productive and impress their bosses, but also to do things like shop and read blogs, which make their lives happier and their workdays more interesting.
From a historical perspective, it's not at all surprising that we are thrashing about, still trying to figure out how to use these new tools most effectively. As Stanford's Paul David was the first to point out, much the same thing happened a century ago when the electric motor came to American manufacturing. New general-purpose technologies work well only if they are the base of a system, or form a cluster of reinforcing and self-sustaining changes in the way work is organized. With electric motors, the important gains arrived only when engineers used them to reorganize factory layouts to improve workflow, giving birth to mass production.
We do not yet know what will be to the information age as mass production was to the electricity age. Detailed monitoring of every keystroke, every word entered, every image viewed? A more relaxed workplace that accepts the mix of activities that fill our lives? Successful automation that makes jobs more interesting by off-loading the boring tasks onto microprocessors in a more thorough and comprehensive way?
Those who work for large organizations will likely face a future of increasing surveillance - in which managers know hour-by-hour how many items have been scanned through the register, how many keystrokes have been made in writing a legal brief, how many directory assistance calls have been answered, and in which modern technologies distinguish those who just look busy from those who are busy. If this happens, bosses can step up the pace and reduce the on-the-job leisure that we all enjoy.
The underlying ideology of the large company - that your time is its time - will, for a while, make the idea of using surveillance technologies irresistible to high-level managers. I hope this proves inefficient and counterproductive, that after a decade or a generation, such bosses will realize detailed, hour-by-hour surveillance simply doesn't boost output. Until then, I fear it will seem efficient and productive, and that the stable configuration will be one in which bosses (like me) will closely monitor the computers of workers (like me) and erase every copy of Civilization they find.
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