June 2001

BUSINESS RULES

Be All That You Can Be

by Bruce Silver

Do you remember what office work was like 20 years ago? If you're too young or if time has scratched that old tape, gather round. First of all, you didn't have to be very high on the totem pole to have a secretary who did for you what you spend most of your own time doing today - typing, filing and copying. You'd write reports and memos in longhand and your secretary would type them for you, then retype them after you had proofread them. Then your secretary would make copies and mail them off.

There was no voice mail. If you didn't answer your phone, a receptionist would answer and write down the message on a little slip of paper. Imagine each of your voice mail messages written on a separate little slip of paper.

Instead of email, a guy pushing an interoffice mail cart would come around twice a day and hand you about a thousand manila envelopes, each holding some bit of vital information such as a notice about the upcoming company picnic. The same preponderance of junk mail as today, but each individually wrapped in paper and string. And if you needed to research a topic, your company had people called librarians. You'd ask a question and they'd actually find out all about it and send you reams of good information. Everybody went home at 5 o'clock, or out for a beer. Yeah, life was pretty good in those dark ages.

And then we got computers and voice mail, and by the end of the '80s, there were no more secretaries, no more receptionists. A little later we got networking, email and the Internet, and suddenly there were no more mail carts, no more librarians. And then we got Lotus Notes and workflow, and suddenly there were no more middle managers, or at least a lot fewer. Even though you weren't leaving the office until 7 p.m. or 8 p.m., your own job was starting to sound as archaic as the other aforementioned extinct species of office life.

Today, computing and the Internet have made us all secretaries, receptionists, mail carriers, librarians and middle managers, as well as graphic artists, travel agents and 401(k) money managers. This is what the economists, without sarcasm, call productivity improvement. The fact is, through most of the '80s new technology in both the office and factory came hand in hand with obsolescence and job elimination. In the '90s that trend continued, but the technology at the same time created so much economic growth, so many new jobs and new opportunities for personal advancement, that nobody seemed to notice.

And here we are. Now at the brink of the first recession in a decade, the connections between technology-driven productivity improvement and job cuts have become obvious again. Economic slowdowns of the past did not deter the inevitable triumph of email, voice mail, cell phones or the Internet, nor are the present gloomy times likely to permanently derail the e-business revolution.

So what does this mean for the future of the workplace? When the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently revised its long-range forecast of job growth, it concluded that the five fastest growing occupations through 2008 will be computer related, mainly engineering and support. Declining will be occupations like computer operators, typists and word processors, bookkeepers and accountants. Who will be doing what those folks used to do? If past experience is a guide, it will be you and me.

In fact, it's not hard to look through the lens of e-business and foresee other specialties in the office heading for oblivion. Think "self-service," as in employee self-service. Need to procure office supplies, change human resource benefits or create graphics for an executive presentation? You'll probably have to learn those skills yourself and make time for them in your workday. Also think customer self-service. Do you really think your company is going to keep pouring money into the call center when it can funnel customers into Web-based self-service?

At mutual funds company Janus, for example, nearly two-thirds of customer contacts are now online, double that of two years ago, and 20 percent of new accounts are being opened on the company's Web site. When Janus announced the elimination of 468 customer service jobs last February, a spokesperson dryly remarked to The New York Times, "Unfortunately, you can't turn these people into servers."

And what about the government's big projected increases in IT operations? Wasn't the new technology supposed to be less "hands on"? Oracle, for one, claims to be eating its own dog food, employing its software to make operations more efficient and cutting IT staff companywide by 40 percent.

New technology lets us do more with less. If you're one of the "less," you'll undoubtedly find another job soon - we're still at full employment. But even if the cuts pass you by, you're still affected, as you find yourself performing those bits of the eliminated jobs that still require human attention. And as our workdays become increasingly filled with the minutiae of self-service, we can only think wistfully of those days of fountain pens, interoffice envelopes and eight-hour days.

Bruce Silver (brsilver@earthlink.net) is president of Bruce Silver Associates, Aptos, CA, 831-685-8803.