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How IT Increases Productivity
Several readers wrote to tell us about a groundbreaking study reported in Computerworld. Researchers at Boston University and MIT analyzed how IT makes people more productive at an individual level. They gathered more than 125,000 email messages, 5 years of project data, and survey responses to see what factors predicted revenue generation and completed projects. Abstracts for the original articles are available. Among the surprises: IT didn't necessarily make projects faster but it did dramatically increase productivity by facilitating multitasking; and IT-supported social networks predicted productivity better than experience did.
Since the burnout rate in IT is high, is this increased productivity good or bad?
Is it elevating your blod pressure to stand behind less productive people in the
self-checkout line? How much more productive is Windows XP than Windows 2000 for
you (if you lean in that direction). ThHe answer for me is zero. Or less than zero
actually.
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aside:
BTW anyone else notic Windows 2000 seems to have a built in autodestruct that causes
strange boot loader problems (INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE)? Proper restore last 6-12
months and then does the same thing again. Bug?
The article doesn't mention what productivity is, or how the study meaured it. Without this, it's difficult to put their findings into context. Is productivity simply getting assigned tasks done? Does it take into account the quality of the output? Does it consider whether people were able to make great leaps in productivity through innovation?
good.. take your expectations and go burn yourself out trying to meet them. when you're 35, you'll find you'll have half the energy you had in your 20s and this crapola you wrote won't hold true anymore. Kids have ALWAYS been good at 'multitasking' while adults are (generally) better at pursuing singular tasks to much greater depth.
I hope I never run into a boss that thinks this way exclusively. it's bad enough that employers expect more and more out of employees' days while paying less.
Duh.. sure they do. But you don't talk about a "career" in calculators nowadays.
That's what's happening to IT. You don't need a degree to operate a calculator and the user-friendly microsoft operating systems are doing just that : the computer to calculator conversion. IT is only a commodity.
just my $0.02
good.. take your expectations and go burn yourself out trying to meet them. when you're 35, you'll find you'll have half the energy you had in your 20s and this crapola you wrote won't hold true anymore. Kids have ALWAYS been good at 'multitasking' while adults are (generally) better at pursuing singular tasks to much greater depth.
You sound like my unproductive co-workers that complaint there isn't enough time in the day to do their work. When I cover for them while they are out sick or on vacation I find myself completing their tasks in 15 to 20 minutes -- stuff they claim there isn't enough time in the day for.
It's mostly poor management, yes, but for the most part people complain that they are overworked and underpaid for absolutely no reason. The hardest part of their jobs is looking really busy when they really aren't.
Some of us that are 40 and under (and I imagine 45 and under) grew up building this tech and are very effective multitaskers to level of competence that this 25 and under (Generation nexters) aren't able to comprehend.
./ers can too. I understood how the telephone worked at around 10 years old and was hacking calls with just a speaker and 2 wires ripped from a taple player to call my friends when I had no phone in my room, only a jack. There was a time when I memorized all the Bell codes (in my area) for redial, dictate phone number, delay dial, etc... all before this caller ID crap.
I can rewire a home for phone service. I imagine that most
My nephew is 17. I had him accompany me to rewire my mother's condo for 2 lines of phone service. The telco only wired one jack and put a splitter on it.
I was rather shocked when he stood in amazement watching me remove the plate from the wall and rewire the wires. Up to that point, the phone is simplay just a magic box that communicates to another magic box (phone) to him.
Something so simple that you can pulse dial with a speaker and 2 wires and get a connection for simple communication was such a mystery to him that I had to rethink what todays youth is into. He can turn on a cell phone, IM, use all the features but if you ask him how many volts his cell phone battery supplies, he's quite lost.
These Generation Nexters will be able to multitask with the tech presented to them but how many will know how to fix the tech?
if you steal from one source, that is plagiarism, if you steal from many, well, that's just research.
Here here. As one of these "Generation Nexters" at 18, I'm completely competent in the use of computers and tech in general. When people need help with computers in my hall, they come to me. However, beyond the basics of "Ethernet cable goes into this port here, that connects to that, etc." and doing some slightly more detailed software stuff (being a compsci undergrad), I'm at a total loss. My current opinion is "If I want to rewire a phone, I'll look it up online." There's so much free information out there that's easily accessible, I think I'd rather be a flexible multitasker who, most importantly, learns fast and can follow even meagre instructions sensibly.
It's a different way of thinking. If you want to know the voltage of my cellphone battery, I'll take off the cover, flip it out and tell you. If it's not printed on the battery, I'll look it up. If that's no use, I'm sure I've got a voltmeter somewhere around here...
I have to echo one of my fellow responders...you don't multi-task better because you grew up around computers, you multi-task better because you are young. I graduated high school in 91, and so my early computer/tv/phone/gf sessions were occurring right at that magic age around 25, when we tend to loose that elasticity of brain that allows us to hold more complex logic structures in our heads - a task which happens to require lots of task switching. It is a very strange sensation to feel yourself...get dumber.
I don't see myself as less capable now than I was then, larger because experience more than makes up for the lost skill. However, I'm not nearly as capable of switching between disparate tasks as I was back then. Perhaps it is not worth studying yet - the first internet generation is in their 20's. In ten years, we may know a whole lot more.
Excellent! Maybe you can get transferred away and your boss can actually get some work done.
Among the surprises: IT didn't necessarily make projects faster but it did dramatically increase productivity by facilitating multitasking
So people were able to do more, and yet the projects don't necessarily get completed faster. And this is supposedly an increase in productivity? I don't care if you look busier. I want the job DONE.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
You do know you can't really multitask, right? Any multitasking requires context switching. Any additional task makes you 20% slower and dumber than you'd be if you concentrated at just one task. So I'd rather live in a future that took this into account and at least tried to serialize tasks for individuals somewhat. That's where the next productivity boost will come from.
He can turn on a cell phone, IM, use all the features but if you ask him how many volts his cell phone battery supplies, he's quite lost.
Did you ever stop to wonder that type of information just isn't important to him and thus he filters out that knowledge and/or never seeks it out? I actually don't know the voltage for my cell phone battery but I just got done making some code changes to a Java application that I wrote to act as a GUI client to a LDAP directory server. I build my own computers and read Linux Journal ( and understand most of it). The standard pulse dial phone has turned into a utility that very few people care to know the ins and outs of. The same teenager who doesn't know about how the PSTN works could very well tell you their cell phone uses Bluetooth and has a 2.1 megapixel camera. It's just a sign of the times. Bottom line, just because I don't know a particular fact about my cell phone doesn't mean I don't know technology in general; it means I choose to know the things that I believe are relevant in my life and/or interest me, I then filter out the rest. Your nephew is probably the same way.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
It's no longer about knowing the answers - it's about knowing how to find or figure out the answers. Ability to learn has become more important than being learned.
Look at who they're studying:
We looked at white-collar workers -- executive recruiters.
Not office workers in general - executive recruiters are in no way shape or form representative of general office workers. Not groundbreaking and quantity does not equal quality if the basis of the study is limited.
Look at who the sponsors were:
The National Science Foundation, Cisco Systems Inc. and Intel Corp. sponsored their work.
Cisco and Intel have a vested interest in encouraging IT use. The NSF will fund anything that follows their science guidelines.
Look at where it was presented:
at the International Conference on Information Systems, the largest academic IT conference in the world.
That sounds impressive to a non-academic. Until you realize that a large conference means lowest common denominator standards. Academic conferences in general are much easier to publish in than academic journals.
Look at the results:
IT didn't necessarily make projects faster but it did dramatically increase productivity by facilitating multitasking; and IT-supported social networks predicted productivity better than experience did.
Lovely piece of spin there. IT use was orthogonal to productivity. Phones were regarded as "IT". Face-to-face meetings were implicitly regarded as "IT".
They found that executive recruiters, who have the job of recruiting people, had a higher success rate when they communicated with more people.
Well, duh.
This study is a great example of the sponsors getting the result they payed for: some astroturf to encourage the use of IT technology.
Based on the ComputerWorld article the study itself seems reasonable but is narrowly focused and justifies almost none of the comments being made here about IT increasing the productivity of the average office worker.
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Monopolies = Industrial feudalism
These Generation Nexters will be able to multitask with the tech presented to them but how many will know how to fix the tech?.
I was born in 1982.
My grandfather knew how build a house (he built his own, my family's summer house, etc). I don't. Will that be a problem for me? No.
Society is moving forward the same way software development is. Thirty years ago I would probably need a decent understanding of the way a microprocessor works internally in order to complete the most mundane computing task. Today I've got languages and frameworks which abstracts the basic (boring?) stuff so I can focus on business logic.
In society today, constructing a house involves so much (building laws, energy saving, technology) that would make difficult and unneccessary (if not impossible) for me to learn just to have a house built.
Leave it to the experts.
Look mate, even when you were young, even thought it may be difficult to remember, most people were not interested in rewiring the telephone. So you comparing yourself to your nephew, does not really make an interesting statistic. How you can draw any information about the current generation from that is beyond me. Maybe you are too old to remember any statistics you studied at school.
Let me reassure, there are still tinkers in this generation, as they has been in the last 2 or 3.
The position of having to know everything from ethernet wiring to set up websites using LAMP and anything in between is completely ludicrous.
If I don't know how to wire something I will look it up online, even if it is an ehternet connection, it is not like it is hte only one in the universe.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
This isn't a measure of how IT increases productivity, it's a measure of how productive people operate. If someone is a productive person, they will get in touch with whomever is necessary to get the information or services they need. Non-productive people don't talk to others because they aren't trying to get anything done. I don't think the person's "connectedness" is provided by IT, in fact I'd argue that productive people will seek out any channel to get what they need to get done, IT or otherwise. IT may make productive people a bit more efficient, but it won't take a person who's afraid to contact others and empower them to do so.
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