Modern Times

The next step in IT evolution

Mr. Chaplin depicts in the movie Modern Times (1936) the fate of the industrial worker. The story in short: he works in a factory where the speed of the conveyer belt dictates the work pace and he, being a creative mind, goes berserk and gets thrown out of the factory. He becomes a tramp; falls happily in love and shows us that life is more than hard labor. He argues against work being reduced to simple repetitive movements and the human being becoming a small wheel in a complex process. The machine dictates the work, not the individual. The system also, as the movie shows, increases peer pressure. The weakest link cannot keep up the pace and that hurts the team by not achieving the output quota. His colleagues press the boss to send him away. Working conditions have improved considerable in the factories of the Western World (not in China as we know), but the basic concept behind the assembly line; the continuous process of boosting productivity and breaking down the work in small tasks to limit the risk of human error is still the essence of the modern production process.

The information technology, that bombards us every moment of the day with emails, twitter, text-messages en communication requests, is an extension of that principle. Your computer and your mobile phone line up the work and you have to respond by delivering your contribution to the value creation process of the company. There is no escape to the relentless stream of information that forces you to respond. Even your simple response: “will do”, increases your anxiety level. You have to deliver and your peers made you aware of your responsibilities. Nobody escapes. The major difference is that in Chaplin’s movie there is the moment of relieve when the factory whistle blows and all the workers can go home, to recuperate from a day of intense and stupefying work. In the information age the assembly line extends beyond the factory and standard working hours. There is no escape. At home, in the underground, in restaurants the work neurotics are looking at the messages on their phone every 5 minutes in case they miss the next impulse given by their coworkers, or their boss.

I am a major fan and user of modern information technology and praise the added quality of having a factory in my pocket, that also gives me music, funny movies of animals and the most beautiful artwork you can think of. It connects me daily with my loved ones and my friends, so it in many ways enriches my life. I also understand how it dictates my life. It is puzzling how I have a hard time escaping form the machine, how easy I accept the consequence of the stress it gives me. And I also wonder about the next logical step in this assembly line analogy. The next step in binding me to the discipline of the workflow. The system relentlessly wants to increase my output and will come up a new interaction discipline that makes the work even more unavoidable. The current recession puts a lot of pressure on the old economies to leap frog over the new economies that show incredible output growth. If we want to sustain our quality of life standards, we cannot escape from the next stage of efficiency improvement in our life as information assembly line workers.

One answer is robots. Robots interact much better with information technology then us humans. Robots accept digital commands without any complicated translation process. There are no discussions about hierarchy or job descriptions, and robots learn incredible fast, because all they can do is listen, adapt and shut up. In the Western world there is a noticeable increase in industrial output due to the deployment of robots in factories. Many products that were first made in China are now produced in western factories, mainly because the price of an hour’s work of a robot is now exactly the same as the hourly salary in China. And you eliminate the costs of transportation and the embarrassment of having to explain the working conditions in the factories of your suppliers. But also in non-industrial production, in the service industry, developments are fast moving in the way of eliminating the weak human link. Banks, insurance companies, travel agents, let the consumer do most of the work via web forms, while interactive Information allows you to choose the transaction, policy, flight of hotel that best fits your needs. Much better than any sales agent can do and much more reliable because it eliminates complicated “have we really understood each other” processes, you provide the input. Unless you are the government and you start an insurance web site, of course, but that is a whole different story. The web form is as much a robot as r2-d2 in Star Wars.

The only problem of course is that it leaves the issue of the deployment of us humans. What are we going to do? It is vital for the system to have humans being productive and making money, or there is nobody left that can afford the vacation or the new car that are now so effectively produced. Ford decided to increase the pay of his assembly line workers to allow them to buy the cars they produce. One of the smartest moves of an industrialist ever. So what value can we produce and how can we do it more effectively?

My bet is on a new generation of software, that eliminates the oddities of the difficult interaction with most of our current software programs. Our computers are like these overpowered machines; they can handle much more only if and when the weakest link, that is you, is willing to adept to new ways of interacting. We are in stage of intermediate evolution. Somewhere between the dinosaur and the chimpanzee. Human psychological adaptation takes time. Ford introduced the assembly line, but his products still looked like horse driven carriages without the horse. In England when the introduced the electrification of the railroads, they kept the firemen (those that put the coals on the fire) on the train, because that was how it worked. Humans especially functioning in herds are conservative by nature. Word (the program), for instance, has been developed based on the old concept of putting a paper in a typewriter and typing on a keyboard that is configured to avoid the entanglement of the hammers of the machine. This was the only way us humans could accept the transformation from the physical production of letters on paper, to the virtual world of words that only exist as bits and bytes.

The answer is, based on the assembly line logic, tasks driven integrated software. It tells you what is expected of you and all other elements of your work are applied as supporting tools to perform that task. Writing, calculating, search engines, emails, databases will be fully integrated in the workflow that you and your team have set up to produce value. No need to start separate programs like Excel, Chrome, Outlook, Twitter etc. Have you ever considered how much effort and pain you go through every day to receive emails, processing them, archiving, downloading attachments (which wind up always in the wrong place) and adding your information before passing in on again? It is the complexity of our transformation from old systems to new systems at work, or rather not.

As with so many new developments, it is most likely easy to develop such software, and some hesitant programming already has been done. But it has no practical use until us humans understand what is required from us to adapt to such change. To achieve this a further integration between software and users, starting with a further integration of hardware and software, is required in line with the development we witnessed in mobile devices. On these platforms gradually the cumbersome actions of switching between programs is eliminated, until the mobile device intuitively understands want we want and need. When I start talking the device understands I want to speak to someone or make a note to myself, if I want to read I keep the mobile device in front of my face, etc. Mobile devices will integrate self-learning processes to turn it into an extension of us. Machine and me, we will really start to understand each other in a couple of years.

That will need to happen to our desktop variety of machines as well. Microsoft caved in into that process by allowing the return of the Start button in Windows. The users eventually will learn they do not need these old world switches anymore, given the course of the development of the assembly line, because evolution is inevitable. Often these conservatisms are dictated by computer nerds, who know all the sophisticated things you can do with a computer, while 90% of the computer users only need 10% of its abilities. The union of the firemen so to speak.

If I were a company like Blackberry or Microsoft, struggling with the idea of the next step and feeling the pressure of the uncertainty of the things to come, I would go for relentless integration. You have developed excellent tools for each individual worker to perform the duties on the assembly line, now improve the assembly line itself. Understanding the logic of the assembly process in the service economy and the logic of the human interaction with work, gives a great start to the next big innovation drive in the information technology, less joggling with software programs and more effective work. My creativity should not be limited by the current inefficiency of the IT-infrastructure. So I have more time eating with friends with the good feeling that the work is done and nobody can bother you for at least one evening.

Rudy Stroink