An interesting discussion on BBC Radio 4 during my morning pot of tea. Apparently there's going to be a "Work and Technology" Conference in London today, hosted by Price Cooper Waterhouse, Microsoft, Industrial Society and others. (I won't be going because the tickets are US$500 each and, besides, I reckon there are more insights on FW list than I'd get there.)
As an intro to this, one James Crabtree was being quizzed about the effect of PCs in the work scene and their productivity. He compared the different strategies of employers when they were introduced. Some six years ago, the government, apprised by the urgent need to bring the country into the high-tech era, fitted out the Ministry of Defence (MOD), among other departments, with thousands of PCs. In the case of the MOD almost everybody above the level of office cleaner or the gardener was given their own PC and they were all linked together in an extensive MOD intranet. It was firewalled against the internet, so they couldn't use them for e-mails or downloading pornography like most everybody else. The result? Hardly anybody learned how to use their PCs -- though many had their photos taken with their shiny new kit sitting on their desks and proudly took the photos home to show their dear ones how with-it they were. But otherwise they simply carried on as they did before -- wandering in and out of one another's offices for a chat, picking up the telephone for distance communications, writing memos by hand and then getting them typed by juniors in the usual way, going to the pub at lunch-time* and then snoozing most of the afternoon, etc. (* We have a large MOD department here -- so that's why we have so many good restaurants in Bath and countryside pubs around.) To encourage learning, the MOD sent thousands of staff on expensive training courses. But when they returned, they still carried on with their old ways. By and by, the MOD decided that all the PCs were underpowered anyway, and staff were able to buy their kit at a knockdown price and took them home -- where the PCs were promptly used in useful activities such as setting up community web sites, buying books from Amazon and the like. In many private firms PCs tended to be dished out willy nilly at the request of department managers if they made out a case that there was suitable software available to make their departments more efficient. Most of these justifications were dubious at first but, because there was no intranet clamped around them, staff started to spend hours a day surfing the net, ordering groceries and holidays, writing to e-mails to relatives, downloading naughty photos, etc. The result? Staff quickly learned to use their PCs effectively. Then individuals started to put up proposals for company web sites to their bosses, they started to negotiate contracts by e-mail, they introduced lots of other software, etc. In other words, many firms became thoroughly computer-literate quite quickly and then began to take the whole thing seriously and not just for cosmetic reasons. This is not just a dig at over-staffed government departments (though that's intended, too, of course!) but an example of the chaotic way that innovations usually proceed -- as Joseph Schumpeter had long ago pointed out in his "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy". Keith Hudson __________________________________________________________ �Writers used to write because they had something to say; now they write in order to discover if they have something to say.� John D. Barrow _________________________________________________ Keith Hudson, Bath, England; e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] _________________________________________________
