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Smart Machines, Smart People

Interview with business school professor who expresses concern over the unrecognized power of technology.

According to Shoshana Zuboff, whatever you've invested in technology, chances are you're not getting your money's worth

Over the past 20 or so years, American business executives have spent billions upon billions of dollars equipping their companies with computers, robots, automatic-control and telecommunications equipment, word processors, and workstations -- not to mention the software and training required to make all this gadgetry work.

But let's say that in your own company you've spent only thousands of dollars, maybe even just hundreds of dollars, on what we're going to call information technology. It doesn't matter. Whatever amount you've spent, however much or little, chances are you aren't getting your money's worth.

Not because you bought the wrong stuff, although you might have. Or not because it doesn't work, although it might not.

You're probably not getting your money's worth because you're not getting out of the equipment everything that it's capable of delivering. Even if the new automated production equipment has replaced exactly the number of assembly workers the salesperson promised, even if the new CAD workstation has cut your design time more than you thought it would, even if your spreadsheet program makes budgeting simpler than you ever believed it could be, even if you couldn't be happier with your investment, the information technology you've purchased has a capability that most users -- including you -- don't use.

Or so contends Shoshana Zuboff.

In the view of Zuboff, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, it's what you're not using, what you're probably not even aware of, that is the truly awesome power of information technology.

For eight years Zuboff followed the daily, hourly experiences of people -- workers, managers, and executives -- in eight companies as they learned to accommodate themselves to a work world rich in electronic-based technology. One result of her study was a book, In the Age of the Smart Machine.

What Zuboff learned about the generally unrecognized power of the technology, its unavoidable consequences, and its largely unrealized potential for improving companies' competitive potential is thought provoking. INC. senior writer Tom Richman read In the Age of the Smart Machine, then had this conversation with the author.

INC.: Why all the fuss about computer technology? Think of all of the technology that we have absorbed over the past hundred years. What's so special about the microprocessor?

ZUBOFF: There's nothing special about it, if you want to use the technology to accomplish the same kinds of things that we used earlier generations of technology to accomplish -- reduce costs, increase productivity, increase control over processes, and eliminate dependence on human beings. If you just want to use information technology to accomplish those things, there isn't anything terribly new about it.

But to make the kinds of investments that companies are making in these technologies, and to use them as though they were just a bigger and better version of the assembly line or a faster typewriter is a terrible waste.

INC.: What should we be using information technology for, if not to reduce costs and raise productivity?

ZUBOFF: This technology represents what I really believe is a radical discontinuity in industrial history.

INC.: Radical discontinuity?

ZUBOFF: All other technologies have had the effect of simplifying and decreasing the intellectual content of work. This technology increases the explicit information content of work. In some ways it makes work not simpler but more complex. So information technology really has a new set of implications for human organization.

INC.: Wait a minute. We have to slow down.

ZUBOFF: OK, most managers approach information technology with the idea that they are going to use it to automate something. The shorthand for that is the more technology, the fewer people; the smarter the technology, the dumber the people can be. But when you apply information technology, even just to automate, it does something else. It takes the very processes that it is designed to automate, and it translates them into data. Then it displays the data -- in a printout, on a video screen, or in some other format. Anyway, you see this parallel set of effects: The processes are being automated, but they are also being translated into and displayed as data.

INC.: An example would help, I think.

ZUBOFF: The simplest example is the industrial robot. It takes over a finite bit of the production process that a human being used to do. But notice that it's not only automating that bit of the production process; it is also generating data about it. The microprocessors might be registering time, temperature, density, geometry -- all kinds of characteristics that, when a human is doing the work, were never made explicit in any way. They were simply part of the action of the person doing the work.

Now, you can be in a control room many floors away monitoring data fed back by those microprocessors, and it gives you insight into that bit of the production process that you never had before -- dozens or even hundreds of variables. The way I explain this is to say that the technology, by this activity of translating and displaying, makes the core processes of the organization -- what really goes on in production, administration, marketing, and so on -- more transparent than they have ever been before.

INC.: What do you mean, transparent?

ZUBOFF: You can see into them and through them and know all kinds of detail about them that you could never have seen before.

Now, on a large scale the same thing is happening to entire organizations. Information systems get linked to one another and to the text-processing network. Companies that are sophisticated about information systems are moving toward environments in which general information about the business is consolidated into one database that is also linked to various information, text-processing, and communication systems. So literally through one network you can access financial data, computer-conferencing dialogues, personnel data, text processing or transmissions, sales data, market information, and so on. Furthermore, programmers are taking information that used to be in people's heads, in their file drawers, on pieces of paper, or otherwise scattered about in private, uncodified formats, and they are transferring it into the system.