Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!columbia!cunixc!cunixa.cc.columbia.edu!garton
From: garton@cunixa.cc.columbia.edu (Bradford Garton)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Low Productivity of Knowledge Workers
Message-ID: <1883@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu>
Date: 18 Sep 89 01:40:38 GMT
References: <9676@venera.isi.edu> <189@crucible.UUCP>
Sender: news@cunixc.cc.columbia.edu
Reply-To: brad@woof.columbia.edu (Brad Garton)
Organization: Columbia University Electronic Music Center
Lines: 31

In article <189@crucible.UUCP> al@crucible.UUCP (Al Evans) writes:
>
>As I see it, then, the problem is primarily one of "trying to put
>new wine into old skins." We will have to EVOLVE techniques of
>using computers to increase productivity -- simply doing the old
>thing faster and more accurately won't work. And we will have to
>get over our fascination with the reams of precise quantitative
>data we can produce with 'em, and develop means of giving equal
>attention to the factors of productivity which cannot, by nature,
>be analyzed.

Very thoughtful answer -- it reminds me a lot of a book I read not
too long ago: "In the Age of the Smart Machine" by Harvard sociologist
Shoshanna Zuboff.  Her thesis is that we are currently undergoing a
workplace revolution as far reaching as the Industrial Revolution.
To her thinking, our current metrics of "work" and (more importantly)
the goals we set for workers based upon those metrics and the *methods*
used to achieve those goals must evolve for us to take full advantage
of the potential offered by an 'informated' (her term) environment.  She
looked at a variety of workplace environments for this book ranging from
several pulp mills undergoing automation to "high-level" executives at a
large banking corporation.  One of the wonderful things is that the book
has a liberal number of quotations from workers involved with job
transformations though computing machinery.  The quotes are right on
target, and the book raises a number of insightful and thoughtful points.
I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this discussion.  It even
has pictures...

Brad Garton
Columbia University Music Department
brad@woof.columbia.edu