Re: Substituting computers for people--positive or negative?

K.C. Burgess Yakemovic (kcby@mindspring.com)
Mon, 23 Jan 1995 10:50:57 -0600

Alexia writes...
>Management wants the reduced costs from reduced headcount. And clearly some
>of the headcount is not as effective as it could be----why should HR clerks
>handle transactions when employees can enter their own address changes
>directly into the HR system? So, we are reducing/consolidating HR clerical
>jobs and offloading their tasks onto employees. Management likes the reduced
>costs/employees have to do more for themselves---a tradeoff.

One thing that strikes me immediately... the non-HR employees may now have
more to do... certainly they have at least had to learn a new "system" for
making changes, even if the work involved is 'less'. So the savings may
be either less than expected... or non-existant. People who have too many
tasks to do never learn to do any of the efficiently.

What I have often seen in the implementation of "resource saving" systems
is that it is simply task shifting...

16 years ago, programmers manually edited their specifications, and passed
them to the word-processing department (yup, it used to be a department
not a program! :-). Now they edit the specifications directly.. and print
them, deal with the formatting requirements, mess with the word-processor
software and it's errors...etc... lots of stuff that is not content
related. So the company 'saved' some heads... but now we have highly-paid
programmers doing clerical tasks... I may be wrong but something seems
out-of-whack if we look at the whole picture.

(And no, having done it both ways, I wouldn't go back to the word
processing department... but I know how to type, and I edit "on the
fly"... however many of the technical people I know don't do either!)

I'll tell a tale that a consultant told me recently. She works for a
small "re-engineering" consultancy here in the US. Having spent her youth
in Germany, and speaking the language fluently, she was recently assigned
to do some work there. In one German organization, she observed that an
older women came into work about 1/2 a day every day... to collect and
wash the employee's teacups. The consultant immediately reported this
teacup washer to management as an "obvious waste". Management replyed
"What else would this women do? We need the teacups washed... and if she
didn't do this job, she'd be on public assistance. Which we'd have to pay
for through taxes. We think this is cheaper over the long run."

Sounds like systems-thinking to me...
-- kcby
K.C. Burgess Yakemovic kcby@mindspring.com
Group Performance Systems phone/fax 404-395-0282
4776 Village North Court,
Atlanta GA 30338 USA

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