I spent a lot of time on productivity and knowledge work in the 1990’s when I became the first CIO of Young & Rubicam, a global marketing and communications firm composed mostly of knowledge workers, and then CKO of a Y&R subsidiary, Wunderman.

Having information technology resources is pretty much a given these days. It wasn’t then. We had to persuade management to invest in IT, raising many of the issues outlined in your post. I was swept back immediately to a March 29, 1993 Viewpoint column I wrote for Computerworld.

I won’t say I’ve kept up with the topic in the last few years (I haven’t), but from your post, the four issues I identified then still seem pertinent:

Productivity Comes When We Carve Out New Realities

What’s that you say? You know the new world of client-server, PCs-for-all computing will increase your organization’s productivity but you can’t prove it? Your management wants return on investment when you’re talking increased customer satisfaction?

Welcome to the “productivity paradox.” It’s a simple proposition: companies in the service sector have poured billions into information technology for their white-collar knowledge workers, but the statistics show no change in productivity. Unfortunately, that’s not a lot of help when you’re presenting for this year’s investment budget.

There may be some hope. There seem to be four main issues that must be resolved:

o Measurement mismatch – Traditional performance metrics focus only on financial parameters and don’t take customer satisfaction or quality into account.

o Technology misuse – There is an unfortunate tendency for managers equipped with computers to divert their time to clerical tasks such as putting together presentations and fiddling around with type fonts. These frivolous activities negate time savings. Technology can be unsuitable, too. You wouldn’t run a worldwide airline reservation system on a network of PCs, but some people expect to support the flexible needs of a knowledge worker workgroup with a mainframe.

o Value confusion – Managing information technology doesn’t add value. Changes in process and structure produce additional value. Information technology assists that. Traditional manufacturing perspectives mislead knowledge worker productivity analyses because the process fundamentals are different: human interactivity, not machine interdependence. And things get worse when organizations don’t redesign themselves because new technologies such as LANs and WANs undercut command-control hierarchies.

o Using the wrong denominator – Organizational productivity happens at the workgroup level, not personal level, but we’re only beginning to think about information technology that way. And designers, manufacturers and vendors haven’t brought workgroup computing fully to market yet.

The prescription for these ills is straight-forward: Combine a process orientation with the right technology.

There’s the rub. And there’s the hope.

Mismeasurement is clearly a problem. We need to figure out what we’re trying to measure with current approaches. We also have to stop misusing technology and start changing skills, processes and organizational structure. Finally, we need the right technology for knowledge work. Virtually all of today’s technology reflects traditional computing, which grew out of a manufacturing paradigm.

Fortunately, the right technologies and the supporting web of changing culture, practices, and processes that make them work are beginning to show up, although you have to look closely. A common design characteristic centers on how human beings work with each other — what it is that we actually do when we say we are working and how we interact with one another.

As technology designed for the processes of knowledge workers displaces technology designed for manufacturing, those elusive productivity increases will materialize.

Nick Rudd