TELDOK Report 94E: IT Myths—The IT Myths Revisited

The IT Myths Revisited This book was originally published in Swedish in the Spring of 1995. Some of the myths identified may have grown more distant and less topical since. We tend, for example, to forget the hype surrounding the French Minitel system, and the ”#21#” phenomenon is, as I have pointed out, doomed to be substituted by some other expression of the engineer’s drive to push the frontier, causing the user some awkwardness while technology is catching up and costs are going down. Had I written the myth report a decade earlier, the Japanese information society, their 5th generation computers, and their interactive optical fibre cable systems would have been among governing myths. Few of my books have met with such interest, so much comment, and so positive reviews. I have, honestly, mixed feelings about this reception. In so far as my attempt at a deeper analysis and understanding of more profound phenomena than hype and surface has been appreciated, I am grateful. Some comments, however, are rather slanted in the direction of my regarding everything related to information technology, to IT, as hype and oversell. I am still of the conviction that IT is an important development but I also believe that it is people and their behaviour, needs and desires that should be the focus, not technology itself. Many of the myths I explore are based upon the implicit assumption that technology is the driving force, and even sometimes, within the realms of some myths, as their underlying causes are analysed, man is regarded as a machine. There is another point to be made here. Especially in connection with my dissection of the so called information society, I claim that the list of suggestions for conceptualising our society—as a knowledge society, an information society, a post-industrial society, a service society—comes out of a genuine need, a deep desire to understand society and one’s place in it. Thus this particular myth, that ours is an information society, tells us that there is a profound lack of comprehension as to how society works, a helplessness, a wish for guidance. Several of the other myths may also, in fact, be regarded as expressions of this same desire to find a new foothold—or the continuation of earlier world views that provided such a solid basis. Thus artificial intelligence early on reflected a mechanistic view of thinking and also the idea that conscience was located in one place, that the brain and the body were under central and conscious control, perceptions that are now highly contested—to say the least. Like with another such development into a world less transparent and less characterised by common sense, one instead governed by chaos, fuzzy logic, and the counter-intuitive behaviour of, e.g., systems dynamics, precisely the distance to the intuitive and the common sense world causes deep uneasiness and a creed for comprehension. A number of people, and rather often journalists, have posed me the question: are there some other myths that you have observed, some which have emerged in your thinking, some which would seem equally or even more important now than when you perhaps discarded them from your book? As is evident from my analysis, several of the myths or their underlying suppositions may be reorganised to be formulated differently, with slightly changing foci and borders. There are three more that I would venture to offer now, two for which the evidence is appearing only as I formulate them, one that might have qualified from the beginning. I would like to call them: the convergence myth the generation gap myth the myth of knowledge as the driving force As with the previous fifteen myths, there is a solid basis also for these three, but I suggest that conclusions from this basis have been blown up out of proportion, resulting in misleading conclusions. The convergence myth tells that since different technologies get integrated, companies, industries, markets also merge. An early version of this was the famous drawing of two steam locomotives moving at full speed along railway tracks that merged from two into one line, the steamcars carrying the logos of AT&T and IBM. And IBM acquired Rolm, a once successful maker of private telephone exchanges, and AT&T succeeded in a drawn-out hostile take-over bid for NCR. Bless the memory of Rolm, and when AT&T recently told of its decision to de-merge, creating three different companies out of the previous integrated giant, share values positively jumped in anticipation. The convergence myth furthermore says that hardware follows but also leads software. Sony and Matsushita thus made costly forays into Hollywood from which the retreat has been cumbersome and financially draining. These adventures have both highlighted the general doubts about such business conclusions from the existence of superficial technical links and, more particularly, the fact that different industries, formally regarded as one—the most comprehensive notion is of course that of the experience industry—follow different business logics and display entirely different cultures. The list could be made much longer, incorporating also the various forays of the Baby Bells and other telephone operators into businesses that certainly offer both opportunities and threats, such as cable and satellite TV. Acquisitions is one route and we might ask why not networking and virtual corporations might better serve the need for a certain dimension of integration, caused by technologies transcending borders, allowing enough of freedom to avoid cultural and other roadblocks, one being different dynamics, different development speeds. On the next myth: there is, for a fact, a generation gap, and also a gender gap. So why is this a myth? The myth is the proposition that this must be so, that the generation gap is something like a law of nature, that girls will always be less prone to play computer games. Anthony Burgess claims that every revolution is the revolt of one generation against its forebears. In this sense, any new generation is looking for something that is different from what is dominant. Almost every day, new information technology offers something that is different. Every child discovers the world for herself and himself. It is a world of animals and people, a world of language and colours. It is also a world of inanimate objects, of tools, and of media, the extensions of man. That discovery is directed toward what exists, it is less hampered by a daily established discipline, by patterns of behaviour, since the child is now establishing its own patterns. Video games, television, computers and computer games are but some of the ingredients in the repertoire of tools existing, and they are absorbed in the same way as earlier generations absorbed reading or schooling or the wireless. In this sense, there is an obvious generation gap, which may be claimed to be trivial: each new generation has always built upon the integrated knowledge established by its forebears. This provides for a head start, but the myth says that the older generation stands no chance, has to give in, will be locked out of some mysterious direct link between the new technology and the young generation. It has been demonstrated that girls take to computers with the same interest and dedication as boys once there is software that is more attuned to them, and that is not war games. It then turns out that many boys that were uninterested of war games also get involved. Likewise, there is quite another generation than the youngest that gets into computers in a big way, and that is retired or semi-retired people. They have time to spare, they often find the world of information technology more enticing than that of television. They may be a bit slow in the beginning, but that is mostly because they start out believing in the myth, believing that they should be at a disadvantage. This is one more example of some myths having built into them a certain amount of self-fulfilment. People believe that they are at a disadvantage; consequently, they accept problems that every computer user encounters, even the youngest, as impossible obstacles instead of taking them in the stride of someone who has been told that he or she should meet no real problem—and who, because of that, encounters no difficulty either. The experience that also older people, as well as girls, take to computers is more recent than the early observations, causing concerns that various gaps existed. It takes time for this new information to sink in. If we in connection with the ”#21#” myth concluded that there is a sequence somewhat like the following so that a) engineers always try to push the frontier and thus have to contend with clumsy solutions early on, solutions that are rendered more elegant later on, and that, b) engineers are more interested to move to the next frontier than to develop tools for conviviality which, to them, are technologically trivial, which leads to c) that the very first applications reflect the concerns and taste of engineers or nerds—then we might expect a certain over-representation of ”nerd-oriented” applications almost always for the most recent novelties. Again, each time this is an evanescent phenomenon caused by this more permanent underlying mechanism. If I now suggest that the current quest for knowledge is misdirected, I can safely claim to offer a controversial proposition. The point here is not, however, to deny the importance of knowledge. And please observe that I am here not at all concerned with knowledge for its own sake, knowledge for fun, for an individual’s understanding of his or her world, as a personal quest. My goal is rather to question the seemingly evident conclusion that knowledge is what counts for business and, not least, personal competitiveness now and in the future. The myth about thinking machines—artificial intelligence—substituting human thinking, and the one about machines substituting human labour—automation, robots, unmanned factories—both raised the question of what makes man, in fact, very difficult to substitute. The answer was not knowledge as we normally describe what knowledge is: information understood in a larger context. Knowledge is something we can learn, can acquire, often with difficulty, but still absorb. In discussing yet another myth, the one having to do with infrastructure as something of huge importance, we broached one more aspect having to do with future competitiveness, the one calling for another concept, that of ultrastructure, which is something of collective importance like infrastructure, but acquired individually: equipment, the ability to use new systems, skills. Are these, then, apart from the equipment part, not knowledge? Ultrastructure is sometimes less than knowledge—machinery forming nodes in a network, software and standards allowing for joint efforts. It is also knowledge in the sense that these resources must be operated, the skills just referred to. But there is more than knowledge when trust is required for organisations and people, people forming organisations, for them to collaborate, to communicate, to understand each other, and to act upon this understanding. What, then, about substituting the word competence for the word knowledge? This is in fact a better phrase since it underlines that the knowledge has to be operated on, has to be translated into action. Competence is a slightly vague term, however. It is sometimes described as consisting of knowledge, the ability to apply this knowledge, but also the will to do something with that knowledge, and the ability to do so together with other people that might offer complementary competencies. This description comprehends a motivational part that is essential, and the communicative part that is also essential. Recalling the discussion on artificial intelligence and robot factories, we may state the competitive factors a little bit differently. Man is flexible. Man is body and not just brain. We have a lot of experiences that are available more or less unconsciously, we have a repertoire of physical skills that are indistinguishable from intelligence. Are we really to include all this in the concept of knowledge? Man is also feeling. The motivational aspect included in the four-pronged description of competence might be strengthened to be described as entrepreneurial, driving, engaged, empowered. When describing why services are of increasing importance and why networks are too, precisely such concepts as flexibility, trust, and entrepreneurship are cited to describe why ”people is the most important resource” or how customer relations and patterns of competition are changing. To this we might add yet another factor that some would include in the dimension of flexibility—creativity, the ability to develop new approaches, possibly discovering or assembling new knowledge in the process. Is this not just playing with words? Would not the word ”knowledge” with all its positive connotations do anyhow? No! The problem with myths is that they guide our thinking, and they guide our actions. If we believe in knowledge but forget about the other perhaps more important factors or driving forces, like willingness to really do something, flexibility and creativity, or if we stress theoretical or computer knowledge at the expense of experience, physical skills, and people knowledge, not to speak of trust, we may be committing serious mis-investments. Thus we see again, in these three myths, various examples of misdirected efforts that may turn out to be costly. The idea of convergence has already caused firms to make serious mistakes. The ”truth” of the generation gap risks becoming self-fulfilling, thus causing unnecessary obstacles. And the thrust for knowledge may cause sad disappointment if it is not complemented with a balanced view of what may be needed to translate knowledge into results. October 1996 Bengt-Arne Vedin Back to the Table of Contents for Report 94E: IT Myths fab.se/"> http://www.teldok.framfab.se/ teldok@ett.se TELDOK, Telia Research AB, Affärsanalys, D241, S-123 86 FARSTA Sidan senast uppdaterad 15 november 1996 av PG Holmlöv (pg.x.holmlov@telia.se), 08 713 5129.