Five years after putting personal computers onto the desks of its research analysts, International Resource Development went back to
typewriters.
”We found that the productivity of our analysts was down by 40 percent when they used word processors to write their reports as compared to typewriters,” said Ken Bosomworth, president of the Connecticut-based market research firm.
”To be honest, we were at something of a loss as to how to explain it,” Bosomworth said. ”But there it was in black and white: They were turning out 40 percent fewer pages each month.”
After much thought, the best explanation he could come up with is that writers use the two tools quite differently.
”When you use a typewriter, there`s more mental discipline involved in terms of sentence composition and word selection. The `word processing,` if you will, is done in the head rather than on the screen,” Bosomworth argued. ”With word processors, people tend to spew out all sorts of information. Drafts are done quickly, and the employees think that they`ve been far more productive. But then they have to spend all sorts of time unraveling what they`ve done, and, in the end, they waste time that way.”
And so, Bosomworth ordered that the typewriters be retrieved from storage.
That`s a radical step and hardly in keeping with the findings of other analysts, but it certainly underscores the nagging fear felt by countless managers: What kind of return is the company getting on its investment in office computers?
”People are very concerned about that question,” said John Connell, executive director of Office Technology Research, a consulting firm in Pasadena, Calif. ”They want to see tangible results: dollars saved, profits increased, bodies off the payroll.”
Unfortunately for anxious managers, though, that`s proving to be a tall order.
”You can come up with all kinds of illustrations that show dramatic increases in productivity: The guy who completes a report in two weeks now can do it in two days,” Connell said. ”But it gets much more difficult when you actually try to track it down to the bottom line. To be honest, I`m not sure that it`s something that can be accurately quantified.”
Without concrete statistics, industry analysts must instead rely on what amount to informed guesses. Most seem to concur with Molly Upton of International Data Corp., who said that ”on average, productivity has improved quite a bit, but not as much as we had hoped or predicted.”
International Data is a consulting firm in Framingham, Mass.
Easily the best example of a wholly unrealistic expectation for computers was the so-called ”paperless office.”
According to that much bally-hooed theory, computers meant the extinction of paper as the office`s primary conduit for the exchange of information. In truth, just the opposite has happened. As one industry sage put it, ”The paperless office makes about as much sense as the paperless toilet.”
Between 1980 and 1985, sales of computer printout paper grew from 2.2 million tons to 2.8 million tons. During that same period the nation`s annual photocopier output grew from 167 billion copies to 309 billion copies. By 1990, that figure could hit 450 billion.
A major contributor to the increased use of paper is desktop publishing, a concept that was all but unknown when PCs began invading offices in 1981.
Desktop publishing combines PCs with laser printers to produce professional-quality typesetting. Many companies use desktop publishing to produce their own newsletters, training manuals and reports.
”There`ve been plenty of complaints against desktop publishing,” Upton said. ”It`s hard to learn; printing documents can take a long time.
”Even so, you`re still better off doing it yourself than waiting four weeks with a commercial printer to get your proofs back and then finding a mistake that he has to re-do. So there`s an area where you can find very definite gains in productivity. But it may not have been one of the things a company had in mind when they first bought computers.”
But Hazel Wagner, Digital Equipment Corp.`s sales programs manager for central states, stressed that even trying to quantify increased productivity in such traditional ways gets businesses into trouble.
”It`s not a question of the quantity of work being done, it`s the quality they should be looking at,” Wagner said. ”Are executives getting information more quickly? Is it more accurate? Is it more up-to-date? Are they able to assemble it better? Is data being used in the most intelligent ways possible?”
Executives, she said, still make many of the same decisions they made before automation. But computers are helping them to make better decisions.
”In that respect, computers have absolutely improved the quality of work being done,” Wagner said.
Connell agreed that computers must be regarded as tools that enhance an employee`s performance.
”You don`t look at a telephone and say `This telephone accounts for a million dollars in sales each month,` ” Connell said. ”You say `Joe, who uses a telephone in his work, has increased his sales figures by 50 percent in the last six months.` It shouldn`t be any different with computers. You can`t separate the performance of a tool from the person who`s using it.”
But even the most ardent supporters of office automation concede that there have been problems in coaxing the full potential out of computers.
The biggest single problem has been the inability of most computers to share information quickly and easily. At most offices, a worker who needs data from a co-worker must walk to that person`s computer, interrupt whatever the co-worker was doing and make a copy of the data on a floppy disk.
The solution is what is known in the industry as ”connectivity” and entails linking an office`s computers into a network that can simultaneously provide the same data to a variety of stations.
Networks also facilitate intraoffice communication. One newly introduced product, for instance, replaces the traditional routing slip by optically scanning a paper document and then automatically sending electronic copies to employees who have an interest in the document`s contents.
Several networking systems are now on the market, but businesses have been slow to embrace them. In general, existing systems have proven to be difficult to set up, tricky to maintain and terribly expensive.
”So what you have at all too many offices are PCs adrift like islands,” said Wagner. ”In those kind of situations, individual productivity may be up, but the office as a whole isn`t reflecting those increases. Networking is vital to getting the most out of office automation.”
Realization of the computer`s full potential is further inhibited by the machines themselves.
Workers, said Hewlett-Packard Corp. researcher Jim Baird, can`t simply
”use” computers; they`re forced to become full-fledged computer operators. ”They have to learn MD-DOS, they have to learn the various idiosyncracies of 1-2-3, Microsoft Word and whatever other programs they`re using. They have to learn how to install printer drivers for each program and printer. The list goes on,” Baird said. ”It simply takes too long to get up to speed.”
Wagner agreed that the learning curve for most computer applications remains far too steep. ”But it`s getting better,” she said. ”With the first versions of most programs, the developers were concentrating on simply getting the job done. Now, with subsequent revisions, they`re able to go in and work on the user-interface and documentation.”
Computers remain an infant industry, cautions Upton. ”This is a growing process,” she said. ”We shouldn`t be short-sighted and overlook the long-term potential of these tools. Things are definitely better than 10 or 15 years ago.
”Do you want to go back to manually retyping a document 90 million times because the boss keeps changing his mind? I sure don`t.”
Baird concluded that, ”To my mind, personal computers today are a lot like dogs were 10,000 years ago. Yes, man had them around, but they kept them muzzled because essentially they were still wild animals. We still have to domesticate the personal computer.”
ELECTRONIC MAIL EFFICIENT, OPEN TO ABUSE
Perhaps no computer application has been as quickly and as wholly embraced by office workers as electronic mail. Perhaps too well. Consider:
— At Hewlett-Packard Corp., traffic on the company`s e-mail network has become so heavy that last December company officials were forced to post a notice forbidding use of the system to exchange Christmas greetings. ”Our system serves 60,000 users and processes 9 million screens of information each month,” a company spokesman said. ”On that kind of a scale, Christmas cards and chain letters are not little things.”
— Ford Motor Co. has made it known to its employees that it regards the growing use of the firm`s e-mail system for personal matters as ”akin to theft.”
— Two Citicorp employees, one based in New York, the other in Chicago, were recently reprimanded for conducting their long-term romance over the company`s e-mail network.
”There`s no question that electronic-mail systems are abused,” said Molly Upton, of International Data Corp., a consulting firm in Framingham, Mass. ”But let`s remember that people use comapny telephones for personal use, too. So we shouldn`t be all that surprised, and we shouldn`t overlook the advantages offered by electronic-mail systems.”
According to MCI Mail, the nation`s largest commercial electronic-mail network, those advantages are many. The company`s studies show that an average of 2.8 calls are required before people link up by telephone.
”We call that `telephone tag,` ” said MCI Mail`s Neil Allison. ”I call you and leave a message, you call back and I`m not in, I call you back, and on and on and on. . . With electronic mail, I send a message once, and it`s there waiting for you. It saves time, and it`s far more efficient.”
Allison gets no argument from John Connell, executive director of Office Technology Research, a consulting firm in Pasadena, Calif. ”I don`t think there`s any question that the greatest gain in productivity to be had from office automation is in electronic-mail,” he said.
”It`s everything automation ought to be: efficient, easy to use and reliable.”
