When I was growing up, we were often told that television would make us stupid. Marshall McLuhan had labelled television a vast waste land, and from my vantage point now I'd have to say he's right. I can remember my father calling the TV the idiot box. However, as a father now myself, and a constant user of a person computer and a corporate network, I can tell you that the real idiot box is the PC.
Why? For something that is supposed to make me very productive, it spends a lot of time sending me things I really don't want (email) and making me hunt for things I do want - files, data, information. In fact I often feel like the servant of the computer rather than the other way around.
This is not the computer's fault. It's our fault. Collectively, the programmers who write the code and the user's who accept the status quo are at fault. Rather than PCs making our work and personal lives easier and more productive, I think in many ways they make it harder and more cumbersome.
Here's an example. I have data on my hard drive and on a shared drive on the corporate network. I'd like to combine that data and create a new report. The computer isn't responsible for providing mechanisms to help me find the data (other than some rudimentary search) and once I find it I have to decide how to assimilate the data, how I'd like to see the data and how to format the data. Basically add the computer has done for me in this instance is to provide a container for the data.
What we need are software applications attuned to the way we want our processes and jobs to work, instead of working to the limitations and designs of computers. I want the computer to alert me when something important is happening in a process that's important to me. I want my computer to organize my data effectively and find it for me. I want to work in an interrupt mode - interrupted by things that are urgent and important. I don't want to frantically search for data across my hard drive and shared folders, but have the data I need served up to me as I need it.
The web paradigm is changing the way we think about work. Now I can work from anywhere, with anyone through web-based collaboration. The web paradigm should also change the way we compute and use data, systems and information, and bend these to our way of working, rather than us continually working to the computer's existing shortcomings. Right now, the computer and the network and the software it contains is an idiot box. I do as much for it as it does for me.
Where did we go wrong? We introduced a product that was good at doing one task (computation) very quickly into a situation (the knowledge based office) that does many things once. So the power of computing, especially given the massive computing power available to most of us, is never used, and the real requirements we have in the way we work are not ones the computer was originally intended to support.
What can we do to change this? Look to the open source software models. That's where change is likely to occur. Microsoft Office and the large transactional packages we use to run our businesses don't really help knowledge workers with their requirements. That's why blogs, wikis, tagging and other concepts and functions from the open source and web world are so intriguing right now to many knowledge workers.
Excellent points. PCs make pretty expensive filing cabinets.
I did some work years ago on a suite of agents that would watch how I work and then present relevent data, when needed. At the time, the tools to build such a system were few, but today we could probably make a good start.
IBM's doing some innovative work along these lines with Activity Explorer.
Still, we have a long way to go.
Eric
Posted by: Eric mack | April 23, 2006 at 12:04 AM