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One thing that astounds me is that technology has reduced the need for human labour in manufacturing which deals with very physical problems, but hasn't done an
by dools 15y ago
One thing that astounds me is that technology has reduced the need for human labour in manufacturing which deals with very physical problems, but hasn't done anything to reduce demand for bureaucratic labour which deals with information!
How can it be that information technology is so bad at making bureaucracy redundant?
- nhebb 15y agoI don't know if it's so much that information technology is bad at reducing bureaucracy. I think it just hasn't been applied to the same degree. In my former life as a manufacturing engineer, every company I worked for focused on making manufacturing more efficient, but few focused on improving the efficiency of indirect labor. The ones that were efficient with indirect labor divided labor into core product teams that handled all operations from procurement to shipping. The ones that split the responsibilities into specialized departments typically added layers of overhead and bureaucracy to the organization.
- alexqgb 15y agoWho do you think is in charge of those information systems? Non-bureaucrats?
- jk4930 15y agoIt's inherent in (human) systems to encroach. Read this and the following five chapters and gain enlightenment: http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/systems1.htm http://www.draftymanor.com/bart/systems1.htm Or tl;dr: Humans in a system resist to lose power, instead they aim for making their position permanent by expansion (rising importance).
- bdunbar 15y agoA bureaucracy doesn't have to make a profit. There is no incentive to use technology to make anything redundant.
- omouse 15y agoThe difference is that bureaucrats know how to work the system. They make sure that they aren't fired. Haven't you ever noticed that management can stay the same at a company but it's the workers who are replaced (at least more frequently replaced)?
- GFischer 15y agoThe amount of information doesn't remain constant - technology enables bureaucrats to invent yet more bizarre and arcane legislation. For example,the U.S. tax code was 504 pages long in 1939, 8,200 pages in 1945, 67,000 in 2008 and 75.000 pages today. http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2010/03/growing-complexity-of-us-federal-tax.html http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.com/2010/03/growing-co... I work for an insurance company, and we spend far more time writing code to comply with regulations than we do writing code for our agents and customers.