Slashdot Mirror
New Digital Technology Can, in Some Circumstances, Make Businesses Less Productive (bloomberg.com)
In a poll of 20,000 European workers released Monday, Microsoft, which became one of the world's most profitable companies by marketing office productivity software, acknowledges new digital technology can, in some circumstances, make businesses less productive. From a report: Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft joins a growing number of prominent Silicon Valley companies and entrepreneurs that are starting to question the social benefits of the technology they once championed. Facebook warned in December that its social network might, in some cases, cause psychological harm. Microsoft identifies a number of possible reasons for this negative impact, including: workers who are too distracted by a constant influx of e-mails, Slack messages, Trello notifications, texts, Tweets -- not to mention viral cat videos -- to concentrate for sustained periods; workers who aren't properly trained to use the new technology effectively; tech that isn't adequately supported by the business, forcing workers to lose time because "the computers are down;" and workers who suffer burnout because, with mobile devices and at-home-working, they feel tethered to the job around-the-clock.
Related to this, there are too many vectors of communication. I have to juggle e-mail, my desk phone, my cell phone, text messaging to my cell phone, Cisco Jabber messaging, Spark groups, spark personal messaging, Google's personal messaging, Microsoft Teams for both personal and group messaging, and even things like updates in smartsheets, sharepoint, and google drive. And that's before even looking at the official workflow system.
I've tried to simplify it. Unfortunately every time someone new comes in they chase whatever shiny new repackaging of instant messaging or IRC is out there and we end up adding new vectors, and the only times they've reduced them were finally getting rid of the pagers and those wretched push-to-talk cell phones we had early on that would kill your eardrum if you had an earpiece in when the initial connection came in.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Software makes me more productive, sure, but I lose all the time I save in troubleshooting. Right now I'm troubleshooting two things: a printer that is giving me an error message "out of paper" even though the paper tray is full, and a database that I have to use at work that requires two-factor authentication (sending me a code to my device that I have to enter to access the database) in which the code sent doesn't show up.
And changing goddamn passwords. I must spend an hour a week dealing with all the passwords.
Speaking as someone who works in a fairly slow-moving industry, producing software and systems that are critical to keep running, I can say we have a low "digital culture" score. When I hear digital culture, the image in my head is of a Silicon Valley web startup, employees clustered around an open-space "developer pod" with constant distractions. Everything is full DevOps, with developers making major changes to the system several times a day. All the while, you have messages coming in from email, Slack, Trello, Microsoft Teams, IMs, text messages, etc. and developers are fine with not having the ability to concentrate on something. If you don't fit that mold, you don't have a digital culture.
Microsoft has been publishing a lot of "DevOps journey" presentations lately, and the main thrust of them is this -- fire your testers, make the developers responsible for testing, and make the developers the operations team, responsible for anything they check in to production. Oh, and remove the quiet spaces and put your developers in developer pods.
My opinion of this is that not every company is ready to go full digital culture. Digital culture also implies that you have fiercely loyal developers who all smart, capable and will work insane hours without question, and that are fine with being bombarded by distractions all the time. When you're Microsoft or a web startup, you can afford to pay for these developers, or trick them into working those hours with stock options. You can also trick them into spending their entire lives connected to work by blurring the lines...give them 3 free meals a day to keep them in the office, and all the mobile productivity tools to keep them connected for the few hours they do go home.
Anyone who says we need to slow down and focus on quality over velocity is shouted down as a heretic these days. For some application types I agree...no one cares if they have to refresh Tinder or reconnect to Netflix, and the only client is a phone or web browser. For more critical stuff, or things that have components that can't be abstracted away too easily, I think the pendulum is going to come back a little bit after the bubble bursts. Right now, companies are deathly afraid of missing out and "digital transformation" consulting engagements are very lucrative. But like anything, I think it'll settle back to the middle...not every company is Facebook or Google.