Technology and Efficiency

Not a universal saving, often more non-productive "management"

Reading Daniel Alpert’s The Age of Oversupply, I paused over his claim that the internet and the information revolution had a profound impact on industrial efficiency.  This is a claim I would like to explore further, as I have had doubts about it in the field of higher education (an exception?). 

Perhaps, the impact of information technology has been inconsistent, and those areas of the economy that have not seen significant improvement, like higher education, can be identified by the fact that their cost for services have increased disproportionately to the rest of society. 

Are there unique reasons for such differential impact?  I rather doubt it, but I can only speak with some authority for my own field.  I have seen the information revolution bring a proliferation of fine tuning and paper expansion in all aspects of the university.  There has been more reporting to more people, more meetings to review more paper, greater use of technology in the classroom, at considerable cost. All with limited value added and virtually no cost saving.  Technology, allowed to find its own level in an institution, will be incorporated without plan or focus into the everyday life of the employee as an opportunity to add diminishing value, at increase cost of time, to every product or service provided.  (I.e., all paper communications are elaborated by attention to unnecessary detail and ornamentation.)

And there is the loss of concentrated effort by the ever-present interruptions of cell phone usage as well as the comic, the profound, the distracting interjection of email tweets, memes, and advertisements on the web.  Not to mention, the enormous increase in messaging (begging to be answered) that one-click communication enables.  (An ever-enlarging basket full of emails to begin, or end, or consume the day.) And the time it takes to attend to them could be better used. 

I suggest this is the result of an indiscriminate use of any new technology (give a hammer to a child and something valuable is sure to get pounded) coupled with the inevitable expansion of technological support personnel who will seek to increase their own importance and footprint.

Furthermore, all hierarchies overreach to ensure the use and value of supervision (accountability) and seize on new technologies as further intrusions into the maintenance of the “system” and its often empty (valueless) modes of control. 

And I have, perhaps, only hinted, in the above, about the pervasive use of PowerPoint, a failed and vastly overused time-waster.   

There is one further, and even more troubling, impact of technology in the workplace.  Shortening the actual productive work/time of the employee to produce the prior output, does not necessarily result in more productivity.  Especially when the work is performed remotely, the saving is converted to leisure (not altogether bad, of course) and there is no saving to the institution.

I return to my initial question.  Is this only true of higher education?  Or education in general?  What about government?  Or healthcare?  It would seem to be universal.  Why then the confident assertion of immense value added?  (In all fairness to Alpert, I suspect his reference is less to the workplace and more to logistics, the supply change, and robotics on the factory floor as technology is applied to these areas of activity.)

There is a further dilemma that probably needs to be mentioned. It would seem that all attempts to combat the inefficiencies that I mentioned above require a further expansion of control and hierarchy, and therefore cost.