(article originally published in Ambassador magazine)
According to President Pompidou “there are three roads to ruin: gambling, women and technology. Gambling is the quickest, women the most pleasurable, but technology is the most certain.” So, will e-technology lead companies down the road to ruin? Of course not! They may be damned if they do, but they are doubly damned if they don’t. The very fact that computer technology is so diabolical means that this is a time of great opportunity for those who can manage it appropriately.
Companies must look beyond the functionality of computers, beyond the good intentions of the designers, toward the observable consequential risks and opportunities of integrating computers into business. A good e-technology platform, although necessary, is not sufficient for success. Computers can deal with objective well-structured problems, at amazing speed, but they cannot cope with the subjective subtlety, ambiguity and complexity that is the human condition. Success (and failure!) will be determined by unique social, political, organisational, and particularly personal factors.
Our touching faith in e-technology has uncanny parallels with preposterous claims made in the early days of other technologies. X-rays were once considered harmless novelty, used unguarded in shoe shops to check foot size. In its pioneering days, electricity was promoted as a cure for consumption, dysentery, cancer, blindness and worms.
Nothing has changed! We believe that computers increase business potency. Governments and businesses have rushed headlong into a technology binge, believing that lavish spending will ensure success and progress. No expert can appear on television without the ubiquitous microcomputer peeping over his shoulder. The modern manager is obsessed by computerized methods that claim to model the business environment. But there can be no control over a business environment in which nuances of detail, as well as deliberate, accidental and arbitrary actions feed back and continuously modify and amplify, elements, processes and sub-systems within a firm.
It is sheer madness to believe that measurement and computerization will make our world ‘the way it ought to be’. Yet the gullible manager describes his world neatly in networks of boxes, polygons, circles, and arrows; a world controlled by bubbleware. However, ambiguity cannot be resolved into tidy patterns, and jumping onto a band-wagon of methodologies is merely compulsive stress-relief. Hence the business-world is full of insecure managers who, with their organizational charts, mission statements, with battle cries of synergy, management of change, competitive advantage, business process re-engineering, total quality management, data warehousing and data mining, knowledge management, with their tidy minds, they turn firms into … ‘obsessive compulsive neurotics’.
Neurotic firms want to control their world by computerising the arbitrary use of measurement and numbers; with systems analysis, opinion polls, market research, socio-economic classifications, efficiency audits, cost-benefit analyses. They see themselves in control of a better world, achievable through tidy thoughts, implemented by tidy minds, on that icon of tidiness, the computer.
The obsessive, compulsive quest for computerized efficiency views redundant data as human faults, to be corrected in the world of the virtuous machine. Companies throw telephone-number sums into the bottomless money-pit of computerization, and forget Dennis Healey’s warning: “When you’re in a hole, stop digging”. Their brave new world will not be one of ordered and controlled lives, but a rule-based bureaucratic shambles.
Madness! ‘Information Audits’ claim to represent reality within their limited models, and imply that all decisions can be reduced to a form of algorithmic bookkeeping. Such performance measurement is more akin to ‘reading the runes’ than to any legitimate science. Yet this lust for numerical solutions is spreading. Strategy becomes a matter of controlling the future by labelling it with numbers, rather than by continually re-evaluating the uncertain situation.
But “the figures don’t lie!” According to Mark Twain: “It’s not the figures lying, it’s the liars figuring.” Perhaps numbers are lies: instrumental fictions. Numerical models can only ever be a pale shadow of what actually happens, and can never emulate the subtle, and not so subtle, checks and balances and the feedback of unknown and unknowable interactions. They really cannot hope to emulate the infinity of parameters implicit in the systemic risk of ‘being there’.
Underneath all numerical methods is a belief in atomism, in category. However, category is not truth, merely an act of choice. A choice that says it is OK to treat similar things as though they are the same, and then to assume that all comparisons between such data-choices are absolute facts. But all data is context sensitive. “A fact is like a sack. It won’t stand up until you put something in it” (Pirandello).
Whenever anyone tells you that information is good, more information is better, and computerized information is best, reach for the straitjacket. Only neurotics think that e-technology can control the uncertainty implicit in the real world.
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