|
Sometimes, those of us who champion technology would
do well to reconsider our assumptions. We often
associate technology with progress, and progress with
all sorts of good things -- efficiency, productivity,
and prosperity. But we might assume too much if were
we to imagine that these good things happen as a
matter of course, were we to think of technology as a
kind of magic dust that we liberally sprinkle over our
operations and processes, yielding -- presto! -- lower
costs and higher revenues.
Lazy assumptions about the relationship between
technology and productivity still prevail, even
though, by now, people should know better, even
incurably optimistic technology enthusiasts. Others,
be they investors or potential customers, are more
doubtful. When they consider the tattered claims of
the dot-coms, the tired rhetoric about the New
Economy, and the absence of quantifiable productivity
improvements, they naturally respond with skepticism,
even cynicism. Accordingly, market valuations fall,
venture capital becomes scarcer, and product shipments
shrink.
A PARABLE
It all reminds me of an old story often repeated in
business schools. Through this story, we learn that we
are not the first to see hopes for a new technology
rise and fall, describing an arc of hope and
disappointment. As always, the rise is a giddy
adventure, full of jump-on-the-bandwagon urgency and
breathless punditry. Then, time passes. The bandwagon
loses momentum. It grinds to a halt almost before the
passengers stop waving their banners. The awful truth
slowly dawns: nobody is anywhere nearer any particular
destination. The recriminations begin. How did this
boondoggle get started anyway?
NEW WINE
In another age, when manufacturing, not telecom, was
all the rage, hopes for the future were inspired by
the electric motor. Indeed, electric motor vendors
were the dot-coms of their day. They generated
impressive specification sheets, demonstrating how
much more efficient their electric motors were than
steam-driven motors. And if the specification sheets
moved industry observers to play with the raw numbers,
to predict commensurate productivity gains, well, so
much the better.
And so, in the first flush of enthusiasm, many
factory owners bought and installed electric motors,
replacing their steam-driven motors. (Talk about a
forklift upgrade!) As electric motors began to enjoy
significant market penetration, everybody looked
forward to the inevitable productivity gains. But
productivity remained stagnant. No improvements to
speak of. What went wrong? Soon the experts, their
expertise now in doubt, began to speak of a "productivity
paradox."
Yes, captains of industry suspected they had been
led astray by balderdash, that they had, in fact, been
hornswoggled. (To indulge in some of the colorful
language of the period.) And so they demonstrated more
caution, clutching their purses all the more tightly
as their impatience gave way to something approaching
despair. Investments and purchases all but stopped.
Sounds familiar? The initial exuberance, the
ultimate contraction -- so much like the current
situation, except we're no longer talking about
electric motor manufacturers. Instead, we're talking
about network equipment vendors. Supposedly, these
vendors have been more successful than they should
have been. Supposedly, enterprises and service
providers have invested too much in network
infrastructure. There are even dark suggestions that
much of the fiber optic cable already in place will
never be used, that by the time traffic grows
sufficiently to take advantage of this fiber, science
and technology will have advanced, rendering existing
infrastructure obsolete.
Whether or not this gloomy prediction comes to
pass, it does reflect the current mood. And this dark
mood, like that which afflicted the old captains of
industry, was the result of exhausted patience. What
happened to the expected productivity gains? What
happened to the New Economy? Lacking satisfactory
answers, investors tired of hearing about marketshare.
They started insisting on revenues. The party was
over.
OLD WINESKINS
But that's not the end of the story. Eventually, after
the Great Hornswoggle had become a memory, industry
noticed that productivity did begin to improve. And to
what was the improved productivity attributed?
Electric motors! How?
Industry noticed that, with time, electric motors
began to be deployed differently. At first, factory
owners simply ripped out their old steam-driven
motors, and jammed the electric motors in their place.
Accordingly, the overall organization of factories
remained unchanged. Factories retained their
old-fashioned vertical structure. Hardly anybody
considered that the only reason the factories had been
vertically oriented in the first place was because it
was convenient to arrange the steam fittings that way.
Or, if anybody had considered this fact, they were in
no particular rush to arrange factories in any other
way. That would have involved possibly costly
experimentation.
Eventually, innovative factory organizations
emerged, until factories appeared with a horizontal
organization, long and low to the ground. It so
happened that in a horizontally oriented factory
environment, the electric motor had its chance to
shine. The electric motor's latent potential became
actualized, and all those advantages that were once
limited to specification sheets finally began to
impact the bottom line.
The trick was to stop imagining that the electric
motor was some kind of magical artifact that would
improve productivity all by itself. Instead, it needed
to be seen as a sort of catalyst that would hasten the
creation of a whole new production environment. The
new industrial environment -- the horizontal
environment -- was what accounted for improved
productivity.
A WORD FOR TODAY
And the lesson for telecommunications? Well, I suggest
that we stop obsessing over technological artifacts,
and instead ask ourselves how these artifacts might
hint at an entirely new productive infrastructure.
This infrastructure isn't merely about equipment and
software. It's about processes and people.
Take, for example, the IP-PBX. Should we really
expect anything special from an IP-PBX if we imagine
that it's simply a PBX replacement? Granted, an IP-PBX
might allow you to simplify -- the "one wire to the
desktop" idea. And an IP-PBX might simplify adds,
moves, and changes. But is that really compelling?
More compelling, perhaps, is the potential for the
IP-PBX to infect businesses everywhere with its most
telling quality, that is, its inherently distributed
nature. The old, circuit-switched PBX was inherently
centralized, which was entirely in line with
prevailing notions of how corporations should be
organized. But now, with packet-based communications
systems, why should anybody feel constrained by old
corporate models? If communications systems may be
distributed, why not the organizations which use them?
I speak, of course, about remote workers,
telecommuters, and distributed workforces.
Increasingly, the barriers to a distributed workforce
are cultural as opposed to technological.
Already, it is possible for remote workers to rely
on corporate communications systems such that they
appear to be within a centralized and self-contained
corporation. Such systems provide enormous potential
for experimentation, potential which has hardly been
touched. But, perhaps once we've grown more
comfortable with the idea of doing things differently,
as opposed to buying shiny, new artifacts, we'll
actually witness real, quantifiable productivity
gains. For, after all, productivity is not merely a
game of intensification -- doing what you've always
done, only more of it. Productivity is also about
doing things differently, or doing things you wouldn't
have imagined doing before.
So, let's think about whole new ways of doing
business and getting work done. Telecommuting and
so-called virtual corporations are just the start.
Ultimately, who is to say that workers, in addition to
being free of geographic constraints, might not also
be free of the usual one worker/one job constraint?
Who is to say people might not work on a
project-by-project basis, participating in multiple
projects, with a variety of corporate entities, at any
given time? Again, this is more of a cultural than a
technological question. And not all technological
possibilities may be worth exploring. But I believe it
would be worthwhile to at least entertain some fluid,
inherently distributed thinking, as opposed to
familiar, static notions of how to be productive.
[ Return
To The July 2001 Table Of Contents ]
|