Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!cbmvax!snark!eric
From: eric@snark.uu.net (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Low Productivity of Knowledge Workers
Message-ID: <1Spfl7#7Ot2JQ=eric@snark.uu.net>
Date: 16 Sep 89 14:34:11 GMT
References: <9676@venera.isi.edu>
Lines: 30

In <9676@venera.isi.edu> Laurence I. Press wrote:
> I recently heard Michael Scott-Morton give a talk in which he
> asserted that U. S. knowledge worker productivity has not been increased
> by all of our personal computers.  I was also told that there
> was a fairly recent Fortune Magazine article making the same point.
> 
> 1. Can anyone provide references to research on this question?
> 
> 2. If this is true, would you care to speculate on why?

I've been thinking about asking the net that same question myself. It seems
to me that the first thing to do would be to investigate whether productivity
gains linked to computer use have been recorded elsewhere (i.e. Japan or
Europe).

It may simply be that our methods of measuring `productivity' are at fault.
Is it computed as dollars of corporate revenue generated per employee?

What of industries that claim to be computer success stories -- airline
reservation systems/travel agencies, accounting firms, banking, etc? Do
*they* report hard data on productivity gains?

If productivity growth has been flat, what is the limiting factor? Are the
machines not powerful enough? Are potential gains lost in the shuffle of
procedures designed for paper? Are the increased revenues less than the cost of
carrying the systems?

There are lots of important questions to be answered here.
-- 
      Eric S. Raymond = eric@snark.uu.net    (mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)