Devil's Advocate: IT, people and productivity

Investing in IT is a must for any organisation that wants to succeed. But, says Martin Brampton, it's a lot more difficult now than automating a factory line.

Talk of IT boosting people’s productivity seems to be all the rage again. This week I’ve read one organisation claiming broadband will work magic and another suggesting IT can offer seven times as big a return as other types of investment. Yet we also know that the productivity revolution of the 1990s was actually just the dot-com bubble.

Now I’m certainly not saying that technology offers no benefits. My train journeys between London and Yorkshire would not be as comfortable or as quick if I were to travel in an open wagon behind Stephenson’s Rocket. All the same, not every application of technology necessarily gives us a substantial benefit.

Take the “seven times” claim. It only says that IT can deliver seven times the return, not that it will. Well, of course, betting on an outsider offers the chance of a much bigger return than betting on the favourite. It probably is not a better bet, though.

Picking winners is difficult enough but there is a more fundamental issue. The contemporary notion of how to achieve productivity gains is remarkably narrow. What is more, the so-called knowledge worker sector seems to be years behind manufacturing. Fundamentally, automation projects tend to assume that someone will be able to decide what a bunch of people are doing and create from it a totally mechanical approach.

This is very much akin to the Henry Ford approach to manufacturing. Individual workers are treated as ciphers, slotted into the production system from which any number of identical cars emerges. Nobody doubts that this produces more cars than a handcrafted approach. Yet many manufacturing companies have realised its limitations.

So long as the only issue is producing more and more product for the least amount of labour, the Ford method works. When questions such as quality and flexibility become important, manufacturers look for ways to involve the individual workers in applying their initiative to problem solving.

Curiously, our political leaders seem ignorant of these considerations. There is incessant talk of modernisation. What is usually meant by modernisation is that workers should change the way they do their jobs to conform to a pattern set for them. If the job needs skill and initiative, then it is far from obvious that this kind of modernisation is desirable.

Taking these questions to their logical conclusion, there is nothing obvious about the assumption that every organisation must be driven in a top down way by a chief executive. Indeed, one suspects that the political culture stems from talking too much to chief executives. Undoubtedly there is an important role for leadership but leadership is not only exhibited at the peak of an organisation.

Academic research does not substantiate the idea that the success of an organisation is largely a function of the performance of a single individual. This question is currently buried under much talk of rewards for failure. The issue is really much more fundamental: it is that the importance of top executives is often over stated. It is not unusual for them to have some successes mixed with spectacular failures, as is common in most human endeavours.

So, if we want more productivity, we need to be open to a broader range of possible solutions. In particular, it might well be more effective to encourage greater initiative by individual workers than to impose the thinking of a single individual. IT projects need to be sensitive to this kind of issue and avoid the assumption that an ideal way of working can always be found and implemented through automation.

There is another important issue that will have to wait for another time. Productivity is far too crude a measure to be our only goal. It assumes that the product is desirable. With environmental issues looming, we need to think carefully about the precise ways we want to produce and to be aware of all the implications of our production. But that is a story for another day.