Real, not utopian

Don’t confuse the message. The future will not be utopia. The seismic changes brought by new ICT will bring ill and good.

But the message is that they will be seismic. They are seismic. This was a central thesis in lecture one

And seismic change brings opportunity. Here is a recent BusinessWeek article.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_33/b3997001.htm?chan=tc?link_position=link1&campaign_id=nws_tech_Aug8

And here is the 2001 BusinessWeek article that I referred to.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/01_13/b3725001.htm

I still consider this 2001 article to be well-judged, but I would extend it a little. I would argue that its becoming increasingly obvious that the spinal bureaucracy of any company in any sector is highly susceptible to reform. The cost and quality benefits seem to be ready for harvest.

Why?

• We already have enterprise systems and their like (weeks 6 and 9), and these will continue to develop, offering more automation to the workplace. Moreover, they are extending their range as companies like SAP and Oracle develop them around new ‘event architectures’. We’ll see how these develop but hitherto industry has been ready to adopt these large-scale systems.
• But still more important in this regard, in my view, is Web 2.0 (weeks 3 and 4). These media-lite developments on the web hog headlines for their impact on youth culture and media industries. It is all very exciting, but I’d make the additional point that they offer all companies an alternative to the base tools of bureaucracy. Who needs the bureau, the pen and the form when they can have Web 2.0?

Bureaucracy is of a time and a technology. It carries technological assumptions within it (the very name, bureaucracy). Many commentators have been saying for some time that the new technologies would challenge and topple many of the assumptions and associations of bureaucracy. Web 2.0 is the most potent expression of the alternative that we have yet seen.

And on this subject, I often like to tease delegates on government courses with these two questions:

Who said? “The decisive reason for the advance of bureaucratic organization has always been its pure technical superiority over any other form of organization.”

• Henry Ford
• Max Weber
• Peter Drucker
• Karl Marx
• FW Taylor

Who said?
“It is horrible to think that the world would one day be filled with little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards the bigger ones.”
“The great question … is what we can oppose to this machinery in order to keep a portion of mankind free from this parcelling-out of the soul, from this supreme mastery of the bureaucratic way of life.”

• Henry Ford
• Max Weber
• Peter Drucker
• Karl Marx
• FW Taylor
  

Think about the answer. The point is, in the end, that bureaucracy is not God-given. It is of a time and a technology. I consider it realistic, not utopian, to argue that companies of the near future will be sufficiently different to the bureaucratic archetype so as to deserve an alternative label.