11 ms·

The IT Productivity Paradox (2015)

80 points by chiffre01 3y ago

vi2837 3y ago
Yes, IT processes significantly differ from those in other areas and can't be evaluated by the same methods - due to the complexities, hidden problems, and overevaluated expectations. For example, the known fact: adding a new member to a team doesn't linearly increase productivity.Nowadays probably AI will help here :)
- steve1977 3y ago
  > adding a new member to a team doesn't linearly increase productivity How does that differ from non-IT processes?
  - datascienced 3y ago
    Other things can be embarrassing parallel. Teachers for example teach X students each in separate rooms. They need to collaborate sometimes but for the majority of their job they have their own class to teach. Restaurant staff can also scale like this most likely. Limitations would come from space and available equipment. But this is solvable and why we have McDonalds. etc. IT is special in having gangs of individual contributors who at some level are like CEOs of the code they create and all the complexity of running a silicon organisation! Every minute is strategy. It is a heavy thinking job.
vouaobrasil 3y ago
I think a lot of this is down to too much choice. There are many papers on this in psychology, but for example, from [1]: "Findings from 3 experimental studies starkly challenge this implicit assumption that having more choices is necessarily more intrinsically motivating than having fewer. These experiments, which were conducted in both field and laboratory settings, show that people are more likely to purchase gourmet jams or chocolates or to undertake optional class essay assignments when offered a limited array of 6 choices rather than a more extensive array of 24 or 30 choices." More computing power and tools gives us too much choice in how to use the tools: we've got dozens of software packags to choose from for every tasks, dozens of setups, etc. The users (workers) have to constantly choose how to use their tools and which apps to open for the day, etc. It's the same reason why people love minimalist writing apps. Their computer just presents too many options. Some people have even gone back to typewriters or writing by hand. Computers aren't really giving us too many benefits. If you closely examine the situations in which computers are purported to improve something, the only thing they ACTUALLY improve in a lot of cases is the advancement of new technology. If you're a programmer or a software company, then new IT is good. But for people just using it as a tool? It sucks. [1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-16701-012 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-16701-012
- nine_k 3y ago
  I can't agree. While computers of course have a ton of shortcomings and difficulties, they allowed easy access to and sharing of information. Collaboration has become much, much easier. To say nothing of plain communication, by text, voice, of video calls. If you think computes suck, try going 50 years back and do a long-distance call (and then pay the bill). The same thing immensely powered commerce, both online stores, and plain brick-and-mortar stores where you pay by your card. I suspect that productivity gains in the commerce / retail sales area should be very noticeable. The general meager observed productivity gains may be a result of the way they are observed (much like Amazon is a company with near-zero profits, such a terrible malinvestment!) and how they are distributed. The latter may mean not just siphoning monetary gains, but also changing patterns of control within corporations.
  - vouaobrasil 3y ago
    I wonder if anything you said was actually a good thing. It seems more like a list of horrible things in disguise: * Easy access to information: perhaps that makes us ignore the most important information right in front of our faces? * Easy communication: perhaps that has made destroying communities easier (just move away, I can still call you!) * Online stores:... too much consumerism!
- skydhash 3y ago
  A toolset is always a personal thing. You’ve adapted things to your need and worklfow, and with that can go with your day without worying about what to use. I believe computing should be customized to the individual or the company. Generic solutions will always feel generic and the current trend of either minimal customization or overcomplication is not helping. I think that’s why some people are pinning for old OS as they fullfilled their role of disapearing in the background and let you do your thing. Now you spend more time interacting with the OS than the applications. Computers can do great, but I think it required some thinking about what you want to accomplish and how a computer can help. Then tailor your computer usage to that. For writing, you may want something like nano/notepad or the full word processor experience. But don’t use one when what you need is the other. Choosing may be difficult, but a period of reflection will help tremendously.
naveen99 3y ago
Paperwork is probably similar. Generally reduces productivity for the individual contributors. But reduces the principal agent problem.
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  Good point. Paper, like computers, is generally being used to track all the goings on at a company. Tracking clearly takes up an enormous amount of time, with questionable benefit.
  - lazide 3y ago
    Questionable benefit until things go wrong, anyway. Or when you consider the alternative. Filing expense reports certainly sucks, after all. Allowing everyone in the company to spend money without tracking or justifying it? Yikes.
    - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
      Yep, I was a little lazy there. The benefit is questionable as far as productivity is concerned. As the comment above said, it does reduce the principal agent problem.
jurschreuder 3y ago
Sometimes in software it's a problem that once a solution is encoded in software by an external party, innovation stops. People inside the company with domain knowledge and who work with the tool daily cannot contribute anymore.
- danielmarkbruce 3y ago
  This is insightful. Software is forcing a sub-optimal process which cannot be improved onto a company.
  - le-mark 3y ago
    This basically the idea around Paul Grahams “Beating the averages” essay which is about 23 years old now.
    - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
      I don't see that. Seems like different issues.
- DrScientist 3y ago
  Indeed. This is compounded by the process being automated being the 'idealised' one - not taking into account the exceptions and variations. This leads to the 'computer says no' scenario - where people who used to be empowered to fix something can no longer do so because the software doesn't support the operations. There is also another problem - often during the implementation of the software solution - the administrator type people tend to pile on lots of requirements for recording stuff that was never previously recorded because the metrics might be useful and the new systems creates the opportunity to capture the data. This creates extra busy work at best - classic example is timesheets - most data entry into company timesheets ( unless you are the sort of company that charges by the hour ) - is a work of fiction. Even worse the 'data' gives upper management the feeling that they can make decisions on the data without talking to those middle managers who actually know what's going up. As a result it leads to poor decision making and an increasing breakdown of trust. It's amazing how much money senior management will spend on an IT system, a sink costs into data entry, in order to avoid a 5 minute conversation with somebody.
amelius 3y ago
We now have the equivalent of a TV-set on our desks. What would someone from the 60s think of that? When I try to look up something for work, I am bombarded with distractions.
projectileboy 3y ago
But then didn’t productivity sharply increase beginning in the ‘90s? And wasn’t much of that attributed to information technology? I don’t know what I’m supposed to learn from this website if they aren’t willing to compare - am I missing some part where they do this?
- runlaszlorun 3y ago
  I’m no expert but I don’t believe it did sharply increase.
intelVISA 3y ago
The main curse as an IC is that your productivity is heavily dependent on outside forces - more so than many other industries imo (or, at least, would be more easily recognized as a management level problem elsewhere) Like an artist who gets a contract to paint a house for a client but when (s)he arrives half the canvas is already wrecked by an offshore team... this is why teams have to put SWE candidates through 9 interviews as a single bad hire risks tainting the canvas for their colleagues
- sambazi 3y ago
  all canvas are tainted, it's the chemistry of the team that decides what will become of it
- xandrius 3y ago
  The "9 interviews" quote irks me so badly: you're telling me that a modern company can have a "bad hire" actually causing any damage? What are code reviews, retros, and standups for? I think current tech interviews (with unpaid take home exercises, live coding, tech quizzes, etc.), are just a really inefficient and ironically lazy way to decide who to hire. A company could temp-hire 3 different people (anyone who applied and could talk about their past projects), pay them for 1 month and you evaluate them then. At the end of the month, you decide who to keep. You might fail to pick a great candidate or maybe not but at least you give people a fair chance to get assessed in the job and not on a little dance everyone needs to do just to get into the door, which just wastes everyone's time. That also allows the candidate to show how they truly are, both skills, learning a new workflow and culturally. Right now, it's just a matter of performance and luck. /rant
  - adrianN 3y ago
    Process can prevent a small fraction of bad hires from doing much damage. Once a critical mass of bad employees is reached the process stops working.
  - Scarblac 3y ago
    > A company could temp-hire 3 different people (anyone who applied and could talk about their past projects), pay them for 1 month and you evaluate them then. At the end of the month, you decide who to keep But who would agree to join a company that has a procedure like that? Most people looking for a job are either already in one, or have several ongoing job applications, or both.
DenisM 3y ago
If IT investment brings low to no returns, what are we to make of the universal embrace of IT by the markets and absolutely humongous valuations and profits of the big tech? Are the markets being irrational for the last 50 years?
- Terretta 3y ago
  Never underestimate the value of a transformational scapegoat to an executive, or a board ... or shareholders.
- sambazi 3y ago
  something gold standard something
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Some uses of IT clearly bring "competitiveness". But this is a microeconomics concept, and while it happens, the macroeconomic "productivity" does not increase. And yes, that difference is very hard to explain. One of the main sources of competitiveness (and the only that should be most clearly impacted by IT) is productivity. Are measuring things wrong? Is there some other effect of IT that reduces the productivity to compensate? Is there something else happening that confusingly takes away all the gains from IT? (Perfectly correlated, for 50 years!?) Does plain logic break down due to some mechanism that nobody has found yet? Nobody is certain about the answer, but theories abound.
trimethylpurine 3y ago
I suspect that IT eliminates jobs that didn't exist to begin with, and that's where the paradox is explained. A company that previously wouldn't have been cost effective to operate, now is cost effective because the jobs needed to operate it are eliminated and that makes its operation possible. We can't easily measure productivity gains in companies that didn't otherwise exist (small businesses that can't afford many mathematicians). And for big companies that could afford hundreds of bookkeepers, the gains would drag for years or decades behind since they would transition very slowly. I'm not an expert though, so maybe I actually just don't understand the issue...
Rutjjt 3y ago
Why would you expect productivity to improve? It is only secondary goal! We measure metrics like skin color of employees, their gender identity, sexual orientation and political preference! Investments are not about the money! That is so obsolete thinking!
tvanantwerp 3y ago
Not sure if its a sufficient explanation, but I like what I've heard from Cal Newport about this. More and more self-service IT systems were able to replace a lot of jobs. But the result is that now you are responsible for doing things via IT systems that were previously outsourced to somebody else. E.g., you're booking your own travel instead of using a travel agent. In some sense, things are more efficient because we don't need travel agents. But also, things are less efficient because now you just have to do this task yourself. Do this across dozens or hundreds of discretely tasks and fields, and you end up with a society where everybody is doing everything themselves in a web browser instead of having some expert or professional to do it for them. So less individual time and focus is spent on your own area of expertise, and more is spent trying to figure out any number of confusing IT systems built to replace a "less efficient" human system.
- detourdog 3y ago
  With centralized IT there was a chance that technical support could be managed. If services are outsourced nobody really understnads the big pircture or what is going on.
- baxtr 3y ago
  But AI agents will solve this! /s
  - ukuina 3y ago
    Why the sarcasm?
    - bartonfink 3y ago
      Because they're just another layer of self serving computer bullshit.
- hinkley 3y ago
  I had some extremely bad experiences with information architects early in my career and came to think that architecture is a responsibility not a job title. I feel like instead of replacing travel companies we should have condensed agency job titles into responsibilities where one person does the work of three, and instead of doing away with agencies, have people specialize in a region, so you’re booked near the activities you enjoy. My ex was good at working airline ticket price periodicity and hotel bookings. We were at an age where all our younger friends were getting married and rather than buying them a wedding present, she would save them $500-1000 on their honeymoon instead. She probably should have been consulting for second-gen travel websites on how to systematize it. But now I think we should have kept the human.
ajuc 3y ago
The point about workers using the new system to simulate the old workflow, even when it's less convenient/efficient is great. It's very easy for the company deploying the system to do insufficient training and for the workers to just try whatever works to get going quickly in the initial phase. If you never check on them they might keep doing the suboptimal thing forever out of habit. Then 2 years later you find out they have separate warehouse gate for each contractor because they never bothered to learn the functionality that lets them assign priorities to contractors. So half the time the warehouse uses like 20% of the warehouse gates for no reason other than lack of training :) Real story BTW.
Anotheroneagain 3y ago
When you replace X people with a computer, you need to somehow create X job positions. As you need to employ all the people, but consumption is unlikely to rise further, you are by necessity stuck at identical productivity.
Jtsummers 3y ago
The Nicholas Carr "IT Doesn't Matter" responses link 404s, the correct link is: https://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=99 https://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=99. It looks like the original link used to redirect to this, but at some point the redirect was removed. Archive link just in case that one ever goes away: https://web.archive.org/web/20150213164505/http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=99 https://web.archive.org/web/20150213164505/http://www.nichol...
kazinator 3y ago
Bringing in IT is a form of optimization. Optimization needs to speed up hot spots. If you make something 1000X faster, but it only took 1% of the overall time in the system, then the gain is around 1%. When you bring in IT, there are inefficiencies. Things that were done without IT have to be done with IT, so there are steps to prepare the input for the machines, and manage the information, and keep backups and all the rest. Some of those activities are new, not replacing another process. Or not replacing it with something less time consuming. A clerk armed with a room full of filing cabinets won't necessarily be able to handle that many more requests in a day, if that is replaced by a terminal and database. Suppose that during the average request, he has to spend 7 minutes talking with someone on the phone, of which one minute is spent with the filing cabinets. If we replace that minute with 30 seconds of working with the terminal and database, maybe that will go to 6.5 minutes. Or not. If the cabinet or database shuffling is done in parallel with chatting on the phone, it may make hardly any difference at all to the duration of the service episode. You will not get anywhere near the theoretical gains from technology, with its blinding speed, until all the human steps are replaced. If there is a "for each request x do ..." loop in the operation, and each iterations has steps done by a human, you will not speed it up until you get rid of those steps. But at that point, the efficiency gain will no longer be attributed to a working human as productivity increase. For instance, there is no question that the web has greatly increased the productivity of corporations in many customer service areas. The farm of servers works unattended, serving up all sorts of information to the users. Thousands of concurrent users. It does something that was impossible prior to the advent of the internet. Because no humans are actually sitting there serving the web requests, there is no human productivity measure.

80 points by chiffre01 3y ago

Yes, IT processes significantly differ from those in other areas and can't be evaluated by the same methods - due to the complexities, hidden problems, and overevaluated expectations. For example, the known fact: adding a new member to a team doesn't linearly increase productivity.Nowadays probably AI will help here :)

steve1977 3y ago
> adding a new member to a team doesn't linearly increase productivity How does that differ from non-IT processes?
- datascienced 3y ago
  Other things can be embarrassing parallel. Teachers for example teach X students each in separate rooms. They need to collaborate sometimes but for the majority of their job they have their own class to teach. Restaurant staff can also scale like this most likely. Limitations would come from space and available equipment. But this is solvable and why we have McDonalds. etc. IT is special in having gangs of individual contributors who at some level are like CEOs of the code they create and all the complexity of running a silicon organisation! Every minute is strategy. It is a heavy thinking job.

vouaobrasil 3y ago

I think a lot of this is down to too much choice. There are many papers on this in psychology, but for example, from [1]: "Findings from 3 experimental studies starkly challenge this implicit assumption that having more choices is necessarily more intrinsically motivating than having fewer. These experiments, which were conducted in both field and laboratory settings, show that people are more likely to purchase gourmet jams or chocolates or to undertake optional class essay assignments when offered a limited array of 6 choices rather than a more extensive array of 24 or 30 choices." More computing power and tools gives us too much choice in how to use the tools: we've got dozens of software packags to choose from for every tasks, dozens of setups, etc. The users (workers) have to constantly choose how to use their tools and which apps to open for the day, etc. It's the same reason why people love minimalist writing apps. Their computer just presents too many options. Some people have even gone back to typewriters or writing by hand. Computers aren't really giving us too many benefits. If you closely examine the situations in which computers are purported to improve something, the only thing they ACTUALLY improve in a lot of cases is the advancement of new technology. If you're a programmer or a software company, then new IT is good. But for people just using it as a tool? It sucks. [1] https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-16701-012 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-16701-012

nine_k 3y ago
I can't agree. While computers of course have a ton of shortcomings and difficulties, they allowed easy access to and sharing of information. Collaboration has become much, much easier. To say nothing of plain communication, by text, voice, of video calls. If you think computes suck, try going 50 years back and do a long-distance call (and then pay the bill). The same thing immensely powered commerce, both online stores, and plain brick-and-mortar stores where you pay by your card. I suspect that productivity gains in the commerce / retail sales area should be very noticeable. The general meager observed productivity gains may be a result of the way they are observed (much like Amazon is a company with near-zero profits, such a terrible malinvestment!) and how they are distributed. The latter may mean not just siphoning monetary gains, but also changing patterns of control within corporations.
- vouaobrasil 3y ago
  I wonder if anything you said was actually a good thing. It seems more like a list of horrible things in disguise: * Easy access to information: perhaps that makes us ignore the most important information right in front of our faces? * Easy communication: perhaps that has made destroying communities easier (just move away, I can still call you!) * Online stores:... too much consumerism!
skydhash 3y ago
A toolset is always a personal thing. You’ve adapted things to your need and worklfow, and with that can go with your day without worying about what to use. I believe computing should be customized to the individual or the company. Generic solutions will always feel generic and the current trend of either minimal customization or overcomplication is not helping. I think that’s why some people are pinning for old OS as they fullfilled their role of disapearing in the background and let you do your thing. Now you spend more time interacting with the OS than the applications. Computers can do great, but I think it required some thinking about what you want to accomplish and how a computer can help. Then tailor your computer usage to that. For writing, you may want something like nano/notepad or the full word processor experience. But don’t use one when what you need is the other. Choosing may be difficult, but a period of reflection will help tremendously.

naveen99 3y ago

Paperwork is probably similar. Generally reduces productivity for the individual contributors. But reduces the principal agent problem.

danielmarkbruce 3y ago
Good point. Paper, like computers, is generally being used to track all the goings on at a company. Tracking clearly takes up an enormous amount of time, with questionable benefit.
- lazide 3y ago
  Questionable benefit until things go wrong, anyway. Or when you consider the alternative. Filing expense reports certainly sucks, after all. Allowing everyone in the company to spend money without tracking or justifying it? Yikes.
  - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
    Yep, I was a little lazy there. The benefit is questionable as far as productivity is concerned. As the comment above said, it does reduce the principal agent problem.

jurschreuder 3y ago

Sometimes in software it's a problem that once a solution is encoded in software by an external party, innovation stops. People inside the company with domain knowledge and who work with the tool daily cannot contribute anymore.

danielmarkbruce 3y ago
This is insightful. Software is forcing a sub-optimal process which cannot be improved onto a company.
- le-mark 3y ago
  This basically the idea around Paul Grahams “Beating the averages” essay which is about 23 years old now.
  - danielmarkbruce 3y ago
    I don't see that. Seems like different issues.
DrScientist 3y ago
Indeed. This is compounded by the process being automated being the 'idealised' one - not taking into account the exceptions and variations. This leads to the 'computer says no' scenario - where people who used to be empowered to fix something can no longer do so because the software doesn't support the operations. There is also another problem - often during the implementation of the software solution - the administrator type people tend to pile on lots of requirements for recording stuff that was never previously recorded because the metrics might be useful and the new systems creates the opportunity to capture the data. This creates extra busy work at best - classic example is timesheets - most data entry into company timesheets ( unless you are the sort of company that charges by the hour ) - is a work of fiction. Even worse the 'data' gives upper management the feeling that they can make decisions on the data without talking to those middle managers who actually know what's going up. As a result it leads to poor decision making and an increasing breakdown of trust. It's amazing how much money senior management will spend on an IT system, a sink costs into data entry, in order to avoid a 5 minute conversation with somebody.

amelius 3y ago

We now have the equivalent of a TV-set on our desks. What would someone from the 60s think of that? When I try to look up something for work, I am bombarded with distractions.

projectileboy 3y ago

But then didn’t productivity sharply increase beginning in the ‘90s? And wasn’t much of that attributed to information technology? I don’t know what I’m supposed to learn from this website if they aren’t willing to compare - am I missing some part where they do this?

runlaszlorun 3y ago
I’m no expert but I don’t believe it did sharply increase.

intelVISA 3y ago

The main curse as an IC is that your productivity is heavily dependent on outside forces - more so than many other industries imo (or, at least, would be more easily recognized as a management level problem elsewhere) Like an artist who gets a contract to paint a house for a client but when (s)he arrives half the canvas is already wrecked by an offshore team... this is why teams have to put SWE candidates through 9 interviews as a single bad hire risks tainting the canvas for their colleagues

sambazi 3y ago
all canvas are tainted, it's the chemistry of the team that decides what will become of it
xandrius 3y ago
The "9 interviews" quote irks me so badly: you're telling me that a modern company can have a "bad hire" actually causing any damage? What are code reviews, retros, and standups for? I think current tech interviews (with unpaid take home exercises, live coding, tech quizzes, etc.), are just a really inefficient and ironically lazy way to decide who to hire. A company could temp-hire 3 different people (anyone who applied and could talk about their past projects), pay them for 1 month and you evaluate them then. At the end of the month, you decide who to keep. You might fail to pick a great candidate or maybe not but at least you give people a fair chance to get assessed in the job and not on a little dance everyone needs to do just to get into the door, which just wastes everyone's time. That also allows the candidate to show how they truly are, both skills, learning a new workflow and culturally. Right now, it's just a matter of performance and luck. /rant
- adrianN 3y ago
  Process can prevent a small fraction of bad hires from doing much damage. Once a critical mass of bad employees is reached the process stops working.
- Scarblac 3y ago
  > A company could temp-hire 3 different people (anyone who applied and could talk about their past projects), pay them for 1 month and you evaluate them then. At the end of the month, you decide who to keep But who would agree to join a company that has a procedure like that? Most people looking for a job are either already in one, or have several ongoing job applications, or both.

DenisM 3y ago

If IT investment brings low to no returns, what are we to make of the universal embrace of IT by the markets and absolutely humongous valuations and profits of the big tech? Are the markets being irrational for the last 50 years?

Terretta 3y ago
Never underestimate the value of a transformational scapegoat to an executive, or a board ... or shareholders.
sambazi 3y ago
something gold standard something
marcosdumay 3y ago
Some uses of IT clearly bring "competitiveness". But this is a microeconomics concept, and while it happens, the macroeconomic "productivity" does not increase. And yes, that difference is very hard to explain. One of the main sources of competitiveness (and the only that should be most clearly impacted by IT) is productivity. Are measuring things wrong? Is there some other effect of IT that reduces the productivity to compensate? Is there something else happening that confusingly takes away all the gains from IT? (Perfectly correlated, for 50 years!?) Does plain logic break down due to some mechanism that nobody has found yet? Nobody is certain about the answer, but theories abound.

trimethylpurine 3y ago

I suspect that IT eliminates jobs that didn't exist to begin with, and that's where the paradox is explained. A company that previously wouldn't have been cost effective to operate, now is cost effective because the jobs needed to operate it are eliminated and that makes its operation possible. We can't easily measure productivity gains in companies that didn't otherwise exist (small businesses that can't afford many mathematicians). And for big companies that could afford hundreds of bookkeepers, the gains would drag for years or decades behind since they would transition very slowly. I'm not an expert though, so maybe I actually just don't understand the issue...

Rutjjt 3y ago

Why would you expect productivity to improve? It is only secondary goal! We measure metrics like skin color of employees, their gender identity, sexual orientation and political preference! Investments are not about the money! That is so obsolete thinking!

tvanantwerp 3y ago

Not sure if its a sufficient explanation, but I like what I've heard from Cal Newport about this. More and more self-service IT systems were able to replace a lot of jobs. But the result is that now you are responsible for doing things via IT systems that were previously outsourced to somebody else. E.g., you're booking your own travel instead of using a travel agent. In some sense, things are more efficient because we don't need travel agents. But also, things are less efficient because now you just have to do this task yourself. Do this across dozens or hundreds of discretely tasks and fields, and you end up with a society where everybody is doing everything themselves in a web browser instead of having some expert or professional to do it for them. So less individual time and focus is spent on your own area of expertise, and more is spent trying to figure out any number of confusing IT systems built to replace a "less efficient" human system.

detourdog 3y ago
With centralized IT there was a chance that technical support could be managed. If services are outsourced nobody really understnads the big pircture or what is going on.
baxtr 3y ago
But AI agents will solve this! /s
- ukuina 3y ago
  Why the sarcasm?
  - bartonfink 3y ago
    Because they're just another layer of self serving computer bullshit.
hinkley 3y ago
I had some extremely bad experiences with information architects early in my career and came to think that architecture is a responsibility not a job title. I feel like instead of replacing travel companies we should have condensed agency job titles into responsibilities where one person does the work of three, and instead of doing away with agencies, have people specialize in a region, so you’re booked near the activities you enjoy. My ex was good at working airline ticket price periodicity and hotel bookings. We were at an age where all our younger friends were getting married and rather than buying them a wedding present, she would save them $500-1000 on their honeymoon instead. She probably should have been consulting for second-gen travel websites on how to systematize it. But now I think we should have kept the human.

ajuc 3y ago

The point about workers using the new system to simulate the old workflow, even when it's less convenient/efficient is great. It's very easy for the company deploying the system to do insufficient training and for the workers to just try whatever works to get going quickly in the initial phase. If you never check on them they might keep doing the suboptimal thing forever out of habit. Then 2 years later you find out they have separate warehouse gate for each contractor because they never bothered to learn the functionality that lets them assign priorities to contractors. So half the time the warehouse uses like 20% of the warehouse gates for no reason other than lack of training :) Real story BTW.

Anotheroneagain 3y ago

When you replace X people with a computer, you need to somehow create X job positions. As you need to employ all the people, but consumption is unlikely to rise further, you are by necessity stuck at identical productivity.

Jtsummers 3y ago

The Nicholas Carr "IT Doesn't Matter" responses link 404s, the correct link is: https://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=99 https://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=99. It looks like the original link used to redirect to this, but at some point the redirect was removed. Archive link just in case that one ever goes away: https://web.archive.org/web/20150213164505/http://www.nicholascarr.com/?page_id=99 https://web.archive.org/web/20150213164505/http://www.nichol...

kazinator 3y ago

Bringing in IT is a form of optimization. Optimization needs to speed up hot spots. If you make something 1000X faster, but it only took 1% of the overall time in the system, then the gain is around 1%. When you bring in IT, there are inefficiencies. Things that were done without IT have to be done with IT, so there are steps to prepare the input for the machines, and manage the information, and keep backups and all the rest. Some of those activities are new, not replacing another process. Or not replacing it with something less time consuming. A clerk armed with a room full of filing cabinets won't necessarily be able to handle that many more requests in a day, if that is replaced by a terminal and database. Suppose that during the average request, he has to spend 7 minutes talking with someone on the phone, of which one minute is spent with the filing cabinets. If we replace that minute with 30 seconds of working with the terminal and database, maybe that will go to 6.5 minutes. Or not. If the cabinet or database shuffling is done in parallel with chatting on the phone, it may make hardly any difference at all to the duration of the service episode. You will not get anywhere near the theoretical gains from technology, with its blinding speed, until all the human steps are replaced. If there is a "for each request x do ..." loop in the operation, and each iterations has steps done by a human, you will not speed it up until you get rid of those steps. But at that point, the efficiency gain will no longer be attributed to a working human as productivity increase. For instance, there is no question that the web has greatly increased the productivity of corporations in many customer service areas. The farm of servers works unattended, serving up all sorts of information to the users. Thousands of concurrent users. It does something that was impossible prior to the advent of the internet. Because no humans are actually sitting there serving the web requests, there is no human productivity measure.