Are computers really any help when it comes to getting work done? For that matter, can anyone define ”work”?
You may have asked these questions, and not made yourself popular. They`ve also been asked by software entrepreneur Fernando Flores. He`s the head of Action Technologies Inc. of Alameda, Calif., producer of Coordinator, a groupware electronic mail product and scheduling software package.
Flores hasn`t come up with any hard-and-fast answers. But he has attracted attention-and a certain amount of controversy-by the asking.
If anyone can have just the right background for questioning the emperor`s attire, Flores has it.
At age 29, Flores, who has an engineering degree, was a college professor at the school for Industrial Engineering at the Catholic University in Santiago, Chile. He was a professor of operational research and also professor of project economics-as well as university provost.
Flores also was finance and economics minister under Salvador Allende. He was imprisoned under constant threat of death for nearly three years after Gen. Augusto Pinochet`s coup in September 1973.
Because of efforts by Amnesty International and other supporters, he suddenly was taken from prison to the airport, reunited with his wife and five children, and flown to California, where a job as a research associate at Stanford University was waiting.
”He read voluminously and would barrage you with ideas when you walked into his office,” recalled Terry Winograd, computer science professor at Stanford and artificial intelligence pioneer who wrote the renowned ”SHRDLU” natural language interface in the 1970s.
Flores subsequently earned a doctorate in linguistics at the University of California at Berkeley. After a brief partnership with Werner Erherd
(founder of Est), he teamed up with Winograd and they wrote a book about artificial intelligence.
”I have never studied `linguistics,` ” Flores notes. ”I studied the philosophy of language in the speech-act tradition with Professor John Searle at . . . Berkeley. Also, I studied Hermeneutical Thinking with Professor Herbert Dreyfus at Berkeley. Before that I collaborated in cognitive science with Professor Terry Winograd at Stanford.
”I have always been concerned with how to organize effective action. This is what brings me to study these topics.” (Hermeneutics refers to a branch of philosophy that studies the methodology of interpretation, from the Greek word for ”interpreter.” It`s usually used in reference to Bible studies.)
”Working with him got me to thinking about things I hadn`t thought about,” Winograd recalled. ”He`s a person who doesn`t accept easy answers.” The result was that Winograd broke ranks with the artificial intelligence believers, and the resulting book, ”Understanding Computers and Cognition”
(Addison-Wesley Publishing, Fourth Edition, 1990) argued that computers cannot be truly intelligent.
He and Winograd decided that human beings don`t ”process information”
like computers; instead they ”invent and interpret reality for mutual coordination,” Flores said.
Winograd stopped pursuing artificial intelligence and turned to studying how computers and organizations interact. He even changed his teaching methods after working with Flores, Winograd said.
Flores, meanwhile, founded a company (Action Technologies) to create software reflecting his philosophy on the nature of language, thus triggering a storm of controversy.
”Had you predicted (these events) to me back in 1970, yes, I would have said you were crazy,” said Flores, 47. ”But there is a common thread to it all. I was always asking questions about work and communications, and I saw while I was in prison that there would be a revolution in microcomputers.”
The thread-which led to the book, the software and the controversy-is his broad interpretation of the concept of communications.
”As a professor and executive in Chile,” Flores explained, ”I was in touch with the notion that what you do in management is language:
appointments, meetings, hirings and firings. Linguistics, I discovered, was about the constitution of action rather than sounds.
”I discovered general principals that transcend local languages. When you make an offer, you make it in various linguistic or economic ways, but your outlook is not from the word but from the action. All offers, for instance, are conditional promises. And humans have innate actions as well as innate language. That`s what makes the capitalist system so successful in the world, since it`s based on people`s innate interactions.
”And now that we have enough computers to connect people, we need more interchange methods.”
Computers, words expressing action, conditional promises-Flores brought these and other themes together with his Coordinator groupware, which runs on networked personal computers, performing electronic mail, project management and group scheduling.
But its conversation management features brought comments of technocratic elitism and ”hip, California fascist software” from other software manufacturerers. ”Messages” suddenly had become ”requests” or ”offers,” which compelled responses.
The software, which has sold 250,000 copies, categorized the things people do innately, keeping track of all exchanges for later referral, clarifying on-line conversations among potentially dozens of people, Flores said.
For example, after categorizing your messages, it keeps track of the order in which they were received, and who responded to whom and what was said-it keeps the thread of what was under discussion, in other words. So by the end of a week, say, you can see the outcome of the interaction, what happened and why.
”The software was controversial, but not among sensible folks. I never thought it was,” said Esther Dyson, software expert and editor of Release 1.0, a computer industry newsletter. ”Groupware makes power structures and lines of authority explicit, and that makes a lot of people uncomfortable.”
But the controversial features were made optional in subsequent releases of the software, dampening complaints, she noted.
”We were the first software that really deals with work and asks fundamental questions about work,” Flores said.
Meanwhile, Flores has been called to consult with major companies on how to ”facilitate innovation,” he said-and to ask those hard questions.
”The competitive advantage of the country has decreased while the computer revolution has been going on. With computerization we are making a difference in trivial matters but not in important matters,” he said.
”The only way you are going to improve the workplace is (by) asking what work really is. If you want to improve a process, computers are fine. But when you improve word processing you`re not improving the central issue of work:
You`re not improving business.”
In the future, ”the central thing will be the development of the integration of business processes and to begin to find intelligent ways to measure what work is,” Flores continued. ”We should ask if we are really improving work. People are beginning to look at this question.
”The time is ripe. People are beginning to see there is more to it than word processing.”
