PCs and Productivity

Isn't it a given technology makes us more efficient? Perhaps, but remember (technologically created) appearances can be deceiving.

by Paul Rolich

As is appropriate for this column, I usually discuss trends in technology–what's hot, what's new, what you should be prepared for. This month, I am going to flip it around a bit and discuss trends in business driven by technology. The personal computer is only about 25 years old, but it totally has transformed the way we do business. I think the jury still is out on whether all those changes are good. It doesn't matter whether our business is selling insurance, managing wealth, or disseminating information–we don't do business the same way we did 25 years ago. And I don't mean that in the sense that would elicit a "duh" response. Technology has redefined the roles we all play in the world of business. It has turned us from specialists into generalists, which is good if you have the heart of a renaissance man, but how many renaissance men or women do you have in your organization?

The personal computer, office suites, e-mail, and the Internet have been characterized as enabling technologies or productivity technologies–the implication being these technologies actually make you more productive. Desktop applications have become so sophisticated they can make all of us look like experts, even though we aren't.

Old School

Let's look at a really simple example. Say I have been asked to speak at some event. I presumably am going to speak on a topic on which I have some knowledge, so it should not be difficult to prepare. I fire up my word processor, creating a brief outline of my talk. I then come back and fill in the slots in the outline with some potential verbiage. None of this required any technology. In fact, even though I will print the speech out, I will have more handwritten notes than printed notes when I am done. Great, I am ready to go–except no one gets away with just speaking these days. The conference organizer wants to see my slides. Huh? I was asked to speak, not create a show. But since everyone knows I must have PowerPoint on my PC, I am expected to create an aesthetically pleasing card deck to complement my talk. Now, I have two problems here–first, I am untrained and unskilled in graphic design, so my slides are not going to be very pretty. I end up using one of the out-of-the-box slide formats and wind up looking like an idiot. Second, and more importantly, I do not like to follow a precise agenda when speaking. I find after a few minutes I am talking about things that have nothing to do with the slides on my laptop. Technology has forced me into a corner–for a talk to work well with a slide show, it needs to be scripted completely–and that makes for boring, unspontaneous speeches. Call me old school.

Secretarial Pool?

Whatever happened to administrative assistants or secretaries? There are a heck of a lot fewer around today than 20 years ago. Why is that? Because we are expected to create our own letters and documents. Unless you happen to be a very senior individual, that word processor on your desktop is your secretary. It wasn't that long ago a skilled admin assistant would transcribe some notes or take some dictation and create any needed business communication. These days, managers are expected to create their own documents. Is this really an efficient use of a manager's time? Secretaries were good at what they did. Bosses didn't need to know how to write a proper business letter because they had an employee who did. And that employee was making less money than the boss. That made sense. Having very-well-compensated managers type their own business communications–just because they have a tool to do it–doesn't. There is no direct correlation between using a tool proficiently and your overall job performance.

How about spreadsheets? How many different ways can you look at the same data and make it appear in a different light? Middle managers routinely are expected to provide very sophisticated spreadsheets that show sales trends and customer demographics and potential trouble spots. Too often they are judged by the elegance of their spreadsheets. That inevitably means the managers who spend more time playing with Excel and less time managing are going to be judged better managers. I happen to have taken some graduate-level courses in statistical analysis. Those courses were tough. I remember the names–Regression theory, Poisson distributions, etc., but I don't know whether I could apply them effectively to business decisions today. Yet we expect our managers to supply us with data from which we will make critical business decisions. Time and again I have seen flawed analysis based on spreadsheets that were constructed improperly with missing data or data manipulated in a meaningless way. This makes no sense. We should invest in IT-controlled systems, built with the proper experts to provide business information we are going to act upon.

With a PC, Everyone Is an Expert

I work for a publishing company. The introduction of slick, easy-to-use software has transformed the industry. Yet it also has created some interesting problems and issues. There was a time when authors or editors were just that. They produced documents based upon their knowledge of a particular subject. That document was then turned over to an art department, where it was designed and flowed onto the page. It then went to a composition department, where it was made ready for press. Currently, authors have WYSIWYG software that enables them to create not only the document but also format it and make it ready for press. Does this mean just because they have a tool to control the entire process they should? I thought they were experts in a particular field–not design. William Blake may have been uniquely qualified to create artwork to accompany his poetry, but I suspect he is the exception to the rule. Technology makes experts of us all. The upshot of enabling technology is it does not enable us to do our own jobs more efficiently–it enables us to do other people's jobs.

The Good Old Days

When I was in college, I worked in a construction field office during the summers. One of my tasks was to do payroll for about 250 workers. It used to take me all day. I would calculate payroll using timesheets from the workers' foremen. I used an electro-mechanical calculator to run the numbers. It was a big, noisy machine with buttons in 12 columns and 10 rows (0-9). It could add, subtract, multiply, and divide. I kept the results in a large multicolumn work pad. The checks were handwritten with amounts stamped on them using a "check-protector." OK, so much for nostalgia. A computer would have been more efficient. Right? Maybe not. We didn't make mistakes on the payroll. That would have been unthinkable. I was paid a modest wage for my work. Today, this payroll would be handled for a much higher relative cost by a large international firm, and the computer-generated checks would be sent by overnight express to the job site. In point of fact, the job I had back then doesn't even exist anymore. And that is the issue. Computer automation has eliminated many low-level jobs and replaced them with expensive services. On the surface, this probably is a good thing, but I can attest to the fact that doing that weekly payroll was a lot more gratifying to a 20-year-old than flipping burgers at a fast-food joint is today.

In a zero-sum economy, there is a finite amount of wealth available. Our economies control the distribution and redistribution of that wealth. As we eliminate lower-paying skilled jobs (such as admin assistants and secretaries and college-student office help), we are forcing tasks that were performed by those jobs onto higher-paid positions. As a result, we need more people in those higher-paid positions because they now are forced to do work once accomplished by lower-paid specialists.

It has been said the CEO who doesn't regularly use a computer is a dinosaur doomed to extinction. I am not so sure about that. Leaving e-mail aside for the moment, how much useful work is a CEO expected to accomplish using productivity suite applications? Probably not much. Let's get real. The primary purpose of business is to convince your customers to part with some of their wealth in return for some goods or services you will provide them. I suspect a qualified CEO can create a plan to accomplish those goals without personally playing with a spreadsheet.

We are so hung up on the value computers bring to the table we lose sight of their true value. The Empire State Building, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Hoover Dam all are engineering marvels that could not be built in the same time now as they were in the last century. The Empire State Building was built in less than a year. It would take that long just to create the project plan today.

There certainly are very useful business tools that are a direct result of the PC revolution–policy admin systems, un-derwriting systems, and CRM systems all are expert systems created by experts for business users. Desktop application suites neither are expert systems nor were they designed for expert use. They tend to give us a false sense of the value of their output because that output "looks" like the real thing. It is an incumbent responsibility of technologists in all lines of business to ensure our organizations use enabling technologies and productivity suites responsibly.

Special Reports /

PCs and Productivity

Related Stories

Recommended For You