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The Productivity of Technology is in the organization
By Samai Hemman,DBA in Global Management
The human resources future looks bleak for the IT industry. Why?
Because of a lack of skilled labor. That’s right. Companies and
governments are coming to grips with the impact of the demographic
shift on their ability to attract and retain technological talent.
A recent report by the Conference Board of Canada, written at the
request of Bell Canada, the country’s largest telecommunications
company, pointed out that a number of factors are at play: the aging
population, declining birth rates, and retiring boomers. The most
worrying trend of all, however, is the decline in enrollment in IT
programs at the post-secondary level.
Major companies in Canada are so concerned by the situation that they
have formed a coalition under the leadership of Bell Canada to rebuild
the pool of skilled IT workers in Canada. I recently attended a
presentation where a senior B- Canada executive announced this
initiative. He pointed out that this situation is not only prevalent
in Canada, but is increasingly felt in all developing countries. He
also noted that the impact on productivity is potentially enormous.
The failure to fill vacant IT positions in the next five years or so
could cost up to $ 10 billion to the Canadian economy. Imagine the
cost for larger economies such as Japan, the U.S., the U.K., and
Germany.
Global Resources
Already we can hear the clarion call to encourage young students to
enroll in IT programs and to increase immigration of skilled workers.
The most advanced countries, Germany, the U.S., and the U.K., have
already taken steps to encourage this type of immigration. The U.S.
has long been the rich kid in this regard, because of the magnetic
appeal of Silicon Valley for ambitious geeks from India, China, South
Korea, the Arab world, Canada, and Europe. However, there are
indications that the booming economies in India and China are leading
their abundant youth to stay put.
Global competition for skilled labor will only exacerbate the costs of
filling these positions. Because they came of age as the great dot-com
bubble burst, kids just out of high school also realize that
employment in the IT industry can be just as fickle as in any other.
They would also rather apply their creativity as IT users than as IT
creators. While immigration and university enrollment provide part of
the solution, there is a need for a long-term fix.
Un-Productivity
I believe the fix starts and ends with the same approach that has
always saved our economic hide in the past. Simply put, we have to
make knowledge work, and particularly IT work, much more productive.
We live in an era when, depending on the measure used, knowledge
workers make up more than 50 % of the active population. As Alvin and
Heidi Toffler point out in their book Revolutionary Wealth , even
machine operators spend most of their time monitoring computers.
Our most productive industry of all, agriculture, is dominated by
knowledge work, and that means farmers sitting in front of computers,
manipulating data over wireless networks and communicating with
tractors in the field by satellite link. The Associated Press reports
that new technology—everything from self-serve information kiosks and
self-serve checkout machines—has a major impact on productivity in the
retail sector. In the U.S., this has translated to 4.5 million less
jobs in retailing than if the technology had not been introduced.
These trends give an inkling of the productivity gains that are
possible though information technology. However, someone has to
program and maintain these computers and associated networks and
applications. Unfortunately, so much of this work is still mired in
mindless drudgery and woefully inefficient.
Moreover, end-users are still forced to wade through poorly designed
and complex applications in order to carry out the most mundane tasks.
While the IT industry has enabled massive productivity gains in other
sectors of the monetary and non-monetary economies, we have yet to
witness a concomitant increase in productivity in the IT sector.
We have to wonder how many IT and other knowledge workers would be
freed up for more productive IT employment if we could get our
collective act together on this. Let’s look at a few examples that
illustrate the un-productivity of IT (both true stories):
• I try to enter my address to sign up for a service online. The
database field has a limited number of character spaces, and the name
of my town is too long by a significant margin. The server repeatedly
refuses my attempts to get around this limitation. I end up having to
call and speak to a human being who then struggles in her turn with
the database.
In the end, she overrides it and puts in a much-shortened version of
the name of my town. This took about 30 minutes of my time (45 minutes
with the phone wait), and about 15 minutes of the help attendant’s
time. Total combined loss of work time for two smart people: 1 hour.
• I move province and change car insurer. As part of the process, the
new insurer sends an advisory to the lease financing company (Ford
Leasing). One month later, I get a letter from the leasing company
advising me that the insurance information needs to be updated. I call
them up and tell them that the insurance broker sent the information
one month earlier. They tell me they have no record of that in their
database. I re-fax them the insurance information, and so does my
insurance agent.
About a month and a half later, the same thing happens again. We go
through the process again. I’m going to cut this story short, because
we had to resubmit the insurance information four times in total, most
recently about a month ago. I spoke with my insurance agent about this
and she tells me this is a common occurrence, not just with Ford
Leasing, but also with a number of other companies.
I estimate the total work time lost over a six-month period by at
least three smart people at about three hours.
I could go on with this litany, but it’s tedious and quite
discouraging (and I’m sure we’ve all been through it more than once).
We now live in societies that are awash in data and information, where
we can find out about any topic we wish, whether through Google, by
buying an obscure or out-of-print book on Amazon, or by looking it up
on Wikipedia, yet the organizations handling our personal information
seem unable to do so productively, efficiently and effectively.
I’m not even getting into the fact the most of the software running
our networks is hopelessly complex and labyrinthine. It is no wonder
we aren’t able to attract enough people into the IT field and also
that we simultaneously misemploy them.
In Need of a Fix
What are some of the solutions to this productivity challenge? I don’t
pretend to have the technical know-how to resolve the problems, but I
can propose some ideas for how we might improve the situation, and
thus free up smart people to be real knowledge workers, i.e., using
computers to do something interesting, rather than computer and
network servants.
I think the first possibility somehow revolves around the organization
of the information and data. There is no lack of information. It just
seems hard to access and to ensure it is reliably warehoused for
future reference. The two examples I gave above are actually instances
of this problem. The solution may reside in the counter-examples I
provided. Google and Amazon provide access to enormous amounts of
relevant information, one through the Web, and the other through its
proprietary databases. What’s more, they seem to do it effortlessly.
Indeed, according to a recent article in Business Week, Google,
Amazon, and Yahoo have started to make their “computing clouds”—armies
of remote servers—available to outsiders, in some cases commercially.
IBM has agreed to team up with Google to create clouds for a number of
top-notch academic institutions that will help to crunch mountains of
data for research purposes. The obvious implication is that automation
of research functions traditionally carried out by the researchers
themselves, or simply not done because of the apparent intractability
of problems, will now be carried out automatically, thus freeing the
researchers to focus on higher value-added tasks.
What would happen if this artificial-intelligence based paradigm were
to extend to all forms of knowledge work? Knowledge workers could use
computers and intelligent networks running advanced problem solving
algorithms to put better information at their fingertips. Help desk
attendants would have access to intelligent software agents that can
resolve issues based on questions by users.
Better yet would be data and information collection systems that end
users could interact with directly. If a town’s name is longer than
average, the application would be flexible enough to recognize that
and self-adjust, even learning in the process. The same types of
algorithms that are used by Google and others to adjust and
personalize Web ads could be used to personalize user interfaces by
various categorization schemes such as demographics, usage patterns,
and work needs.
This also leverages the fact that consumers and system users
increasingly prefer to do their own purchasing and other functions
directly, without the involvement of intermediaries. The productivity
improvements of extending the Amazon shopping paradigm to a vast array
of economic and work-oriented functions are potentially huge. This
leads to a second possibility for increasing IT productivity.
Giving Up Control
Companies and other organizations would do well to give as much
flexibility and control as possible to consumers. This entails better
software design, more advanced artificial intelligence, more ergonomic
interfaces, superb systems integration and absolute ease of use. These
technological advances would attract and retain more customers, and
also reduce the need for skilled or semi-skilled workers to maintain
systems and interact with customers.
The best example of this vision is, of course, how Apple has managed
to create extremely powerful consumer applications that wonderfully
integrate hardware, software, and intelligent functionality. Just look
at Time Machine, the new backup utility in Mac OS X Leopard. You plug
in the backup device (e.g., an external hard drive) and select it in a
menu that pops up automatically. Voilà! You’ve set up your computer
for home backup. If you need to access backed up information for
whatever reason, you just click on the Time Machine icon on the
desktop, and the screen changes to a depiction of the file finder
application at various points in the past. Select the time point you
want, select the file you want, and it is automatically restored.
What if networks and databases could be configured, maintained and
accessed using analogous approaches? Organizations could then redirect
programmers and systems administrators to higher value added tasks and
functions. Users would interact directly with applications and gain
greater control over their data and information.
We have to start thinking of how to make IT work as productive as
possible, not just for the end user, but also for the masses of
programmers, analysts, system administrators and network managers.
These are only initial ideas of how computers and networks could be
used more productively. The need is already great, and will only grow
greater in the years ahead. If we don’t start acting now, then we will
be in an even tighter squeeze down the road as the changing
demographics of advanced societies make workers even more of a rarity.
The IT sector has benefited from its novelty and the challenge it
offers to creative young people for decades—ever since the invention
of the PC really—but now it must face the demographic music just like
every other sector of the economy. Increasing the productivity of
knowledge work is a necessity, but drastic increases in the
productivity of IT work are even more critical to our continued
economic growth and to creation of wealth and quality of life.
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