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.

Comments

That was true YEARS ago

[davecb]

Back when Honeywell made computers as well as thermostats, a study was made of managers who stareted using a new, on-line financial planning application, a kind a strange mainframe-based spreadsheet-thingie. The ones who reported using it heavily had far worse contributions to profitability than everyone else. We figure they were heads-down in the computer when they should havce been doing management (;-))

Re:That was true YEARS ago

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the thing, often new tech can NOT be introduced into an existing workplace without introduce new employees who actually know how to use it.

Look, I'm not that old, but one of my clients hired this 20 year old girl who wanted us to switch to Slack and Asana to do things, from our previous Skype+email system. While I did like slack better than Skype, everything else became harder to manage from Slack, and pretty much nobody paid attention to Asana.

Which is to say, you can not replace your organizations communication tools if you don't train them on it. When I worked for eBay (before they bought Skype) everyone was using MSN messenger, the minute we had Skype everyone was told to use Skype or else. However the web-browser based customer-facing Email client was slow as ass, and people preferred using the much older email client because it was less buggy and worked better with the macros.

In another example with AT&T, they replaced AXYS with SIEBEL, and god damn everyone hated that thing.

Even my dad's office back in 1996 resisted Microsoft Windows 95 and Microsoft Office. It was not what they were used to.

Every time you change things, you lose productivity if you don't retrain your staff on it. This goes double for software products like Microsoft Office that staff spend a lot of time in front of, but don't use any of the bells and whistles of for fear of losing time asking for help.

Social media, is harmful, very harmful. Especially in places like Schools and Government offices. While they do offer a good way to interact with customers, customers are often not very thankful for it. But when you interact with students and teachers, and bureaucrats, you will get nothing but hate.

Re:That was true YEARS ago

[Anon-Admin]

I wish I had mod points, I would mod you up.

> Every time you change things, you lose productivity if you don't retrain your staff on it.

In the last 15 years, I have never seen a company retrain their staff for new technology. They simply throw it out there, send out a memo about how great it is, and move on. They expect everyone to figure it out on their own.

too many vectors of communication

[TWX]

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.

Cat videos

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

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

Almost all the sci fi writers since 1960 imagined small devices that will fit into the palm of a person giving access to the entire collective knowledge of human beings. What they failed to imagine was that, half of the collective wisdom of human beings consists of cat videos.

Spent my career replacing green screens

[bigmacx]

...and inflicting mouse-driven GUI lunacy on corporations. In all cases, it seemed employees "could do more," but really they "had to do more" because of the new technology. There was the birth of incessant goofing off with solitaire, personal email, social media, ebay, etc. Then companies had to install all kinds of complicated stuff to block, monitor, and mitigate their companies screwing off with their tech. I road the "it must be better because you told me so" $ train for years selling that crap.

I'm not anti-tech to the point of living in a cabin and abusing postal mail, but I do think for many, many purposes, a terminal-based application running off a dedicated host (or cluster of hosts) provides a company with a far more efficient, both in direct & indirect costs, system to accomplish a business goal than all these multi-purpose general-purpose GUI desktop OS's.

Example: I have one customer that had a UNIX terminal and hand scanner system to manage a large network of warehouses and light manufacturing at various geographical locations. They (the accounts and executives) decided the yearly maintenance costs of the UNIX application vendor were too high, so they were going to modernize it. They ended up buying a farm of Windows servers and Windows desktops everywhere (with all the obligatory firewalls, AV, employee monitoring stuff they needed to make their employees actually use the stuff for work) and spent enough money (up front, not planned ongoing costs) to fund 10 years worth of the original UNIX application vendor's maintenance fees.

Worst part: under UNIX terminal system they used hand and forklift scanners with telnet to scan inventory and logistics moves. These cost at most $1000 in the highest complexity scenario; usually about $750 in routine cases. With the new system, every mobile production location needed $6000 Windows hand-held terminals so they could RDP into the fancy smancy Windows terminal farm, all so they could scan 2-D bar codes on supplies and inventory as it moved around the organization. Lunacy.

We were a happier civilization as Cave Men

No shit, Sherlock ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because so many of the damned 'new technologies' roll out are utterly pointless social garbage.

I've now been at two companies who have rolled out some god-awful social media things in which we were all going to chat and collaborate and make the company an awesome and innovative place.

The problem is they have no useful information, are mostly people who have drank way too much of the corporate kool-aid braying about how innovative this useless platform is, and an endless stream of utterly pointless stuff.

There is nothing if value to me in doing my job in it, I have no time to waste on it, and I'm admonished for not participating in it because it adds no value to my life but in theory could benefit some guy in some other country I've never met. I'm sorry, but I'm not spending time on a platform which provides no utility to me in doing my job.

I have no idea who told them this technology would in some way enhance the organization or improve my ability to do my job -- the signal to noise ratio is pretty much approaching zero, so I ignore these things in their entirety. Because I can plainly see this is useless garbage that some VP or whatever decided would leverage the synergies and make all of the sheep flock in the same direction.

When I leave the office, my company cell stays in my laptop bag. Sorry, you don't pay me for 24 hour connectivity, I'm not on call, and when I walk out of the office you shouldn't expect that I'm obsessively checking my email.

I'm certainly not interested in anything even resembling social media ... I don't use it in my personal life because it's a waste of time, in my professional life doubly so. Stop acting like a message board type thingy is supposed to make me more productive, because it doesn't, hasn't, and won't.

Not just social aps

[XXongo]

It's not just social aps that make things less productive: it's troubleshooting all the damn software and figuring out workarounds for problems.

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.

Note the use of "digital culture"

[ErichTheRed]

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.