British organisations are failing to get real productivity gains from the £50bn they spend every year on information and communications technologies (ICT), according to a report from iSociety, a special research project set up by the Work Foundation thinktank.
Implemented correctly, ICT can deliver a potential five to seven-fold return on investment, says Max Nathan, iSociety researcher and co-author of Getting by, Not Getting On: Technology in UK Workplaces, published today.
Unfortunately, British workplaces often get stuck in "low-tech equilibrium". Nathan points to a series of causes. Technology companies oversell their products to technically illiterate managers, who then deploy the kit in inappropriate ways. Employees get no real training. And the IT support staff that could help are often disconnected (physically and culturally) from management and workers. "The result is not that everything grinds to a halt, but that things bump along the bottom and don't work as well as they could."
ISociety's 12-month effort began with a survey of existing research, which showed that, despite mass take-up of technology (three-quarters of the workforce use a PC or another form of ICT), the work people do, or get done, hasn't changed much. "Recent research suggests that, while ICT investment did have an impact over the 90s, the positive effects are now tailing off," says Nathan. To find out why, iSociety researchers visited eight organisations, from small businesses to multinationals, to see how employees used ICT.
Their findings undermine much conventional wisdom about technology and its effects, such as the claim that computer networks in general, and email in particular, undermine hierarchies, enabling information to flow more easily around organisations. The report shows that barriers within firms are expressed in new ways via new technologies - via email style, for example. Nathan says they discovered top-level management asserting status by sending terse emails littered with spelling mistakes, sending the message they were too busy for or above this new technology stuff, thus undermining the systems they invested in.
In the past, the technology industry made big claims for the productivity gains its products would bring. "But technology is not transforma tional on its own," says Nathan. "The rhetoric of solutions you hear from the technology industry is particularly corrosive. It implies that you can just stick this stuff on the desk and things will start changing."
Technology firms are learning from their mistakes, he says, citing the positive response to the report's findings from Microsoft which, along with PriceWaterhouseCooper, sponsors iSociety. "The industry sees that it needs to push the message that technology is not transformational on its own, that if it is to work properly, it requires complementary investments in people and processes, too."
Involving employees who will use the technology in the process is crucial, says Nathan, who points to the problems experienced by companies deploying knowledge management (KM) systems. Often, he says, they fail to look at how employees work. Many have laboured hard to gather knowledge they don't want to share on one general system. The best workplace KM system recognised this. Set up by a public sector organisation, it let employees keep certain bits of information to themselves. However, the key products of the agency - position papers and the like - had standard public locations on the network and there were rules around their use.
In contrast, many firms set up big KM systems that try to pool all an organisation's knowledge on one network. These systems are often ignored by employees, who instead manage data via other tools (for example email in-boxes). "You get the worst of both worlds," says Nathan. "You've spent money on a KM system no one uses and you're paying for extra storage because people are filing everything in their in-boxes."
Email shows that employees still need guidance. Organisations have assumed that because email is easy to pick up, they can just let employees get on with it. The result is internal email overload as workers spam each other with pointless work-related mail. Firms that develop guidelines avoid this problem, says Nathan. "Where email was working well, people had a strong sense about what appropriate use was."
The report suggests various ways out of low-tech equilibrium. Nathan says there should be compulsory IT literacy tests for "the lost generation of managers" - the bosses who know less about technology than employees. Organisations should offer more ICT training for employees.
Overall, Britain's firms may need help to break out of the condition. In the end, the government should get involved, Nathan says, venturing that it should consider technology driving licences for all employees. "One IT director said we wouldn't send people into a factory without training on the machines but we seem perfectly happy to send people into workplaces using ICT with no training. Then we get frustrated when we don't get as much out of the stuff as we thought. If you put it like that, it's a no-brainer."
Links Getting by, not getting on
www.theworkfoundation.com/research/isociety
