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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.
...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
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.