Comments on: In the wrong hands, IT tools can reduce productivity!

By: The downside of automation « TimeBack Management

The downside of automation « TimeBack Management — Mon, 17 May 2010 09:39:29 +0000

[...] Zeldes, former Intel engineer and author of the seminal paper on Infomania, argues that IT tools can reduce productivity. He doesn’t suggest that computers and information [...]

By: Computers in Health Care – Take 2 at Challenge Information Overload

Computers in Health Care – Take 2 at Challenge Information Overload — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 16:10:25 +0000

[...] mentioned in a recent post Lesa Becker’s study of the impact of computer adoption on hospital personnel. Well, I was [...]

By: Nathan Zeldes

Nathan Zeldes — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:19:01 +0000

@chaniarts, I wasn’t advocating throwing the baby with the bathwater, or going back to the fifties. As I wrote, it’s about identifying the correct BALANCE.

That said, in many cases the clerical help did save serious amounts of time even after you add the overhead. For example, I once had to use a system for expense report submission that would take me maybe half an hour to enter the endless details of a week long business trip; stuffing the receipts in an envelope and handing it to an admin would have taken 30 seconds. What’s more, it would have taken a skilled admin ten minutes to my thirty, due to being better versed in the use of the system by virtue of having had much more practice…

By: Lesa Becker, PhD

Lesa Becker, PhD — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 14:33:00 +0000

Thanks for highlighting the shift in work for leaders as they spend more time managing information and technology at the expense of leading people.

New research I have conducted suggests this information management burden is continuing to expand in large organizations. Leaders indicate there are up to 40 applications they must learn in order to do their jobs.

Since most organizations are not adding clerical workers to ease the burden, I have begun to focus on providing job aids, quick reference cards and mini-tutorials to help busy professionals get up to speed quickly on learning these new applications.

By: chaniarts

chaniarts — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 22:14:28 +0000

are you saying that we should go back to the time when the secretary would park her butt on the edge of the desk and whip out a steno pad to take dictation?

the time to transmit data from the manager to the lower level worker, along with the clarification requests and checking, is greater than the time it takes for the manager to do the task. you have to add the cost of this time, along with the cost for the inevitable mistakes, checking, and rework, to the cost of the lower level worker.

By: Daniel Markovitz

Daniel Markovitz — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 21:18:06 +0000

Thanks for the thoughtful post, Nathan. You’ve hit on something very important here.

Your comment reminds me of something that Toyota has long preached: that if you apply technology to a broken process, all you end up with is a faster broken process. That’s not to say that all administrative scut work is worthless or the result of a broken process, but much of it surely is.

Your question reminds me that we should not only fix the process before investing in IT, but that we have to think about if and where the work will shift.