After finishing my first degree, I worked for a summer in a typewriter factory. Typewriters are now so obsolete that it is usually necessary to explain to younger people what they were for. But this experience taught me a lot about information and how it is used in organisations. This was because I worked on what was then called ‘O&M’, reporting to a rather odd but very clever Welshman. The first law of information that I learnt was:
1. Information is costly. Back in 1968, there were no photocopiers, office computers, or emails. If you wanted a copy of a letter, the typist had to insert carbons and additional sheets of paper when she typed. There was a limit of about three or four copies that could be made this way. If you needed more, then a different process was required. The typist would type the report on specially-waxed ‘skins’, which were attached to the drum of a machine we called a ‘Gestetner’. The drum would contain thick black ink, which you always got on your hands. Both methods of copying were costly and time-consuming, and a major O&M task was therefore to reduce the amount of unnecessary information circulating round the factory. We did this by creating a flow diagram for all the routine reports generated by staff, and asking their recipients whether they found them useful. We found that many reports had begun as one-off requests by management to meet a specific need, but had then become routinised. Some reports went straight from the envelope to the waste paper bin.
This seems a lost world now because photocopiers, word-processing and emailing have successively made the production of multiple copies much easier. But this has had the effect of shifting the cost of information to the reader. People in offices now spend hours a week sifting through emails, most of which come from their seniors but are irrelevant to their work. Emails accumulate in inboxes, and the ones which require rapid attention are missed. Because the idea has taken root that information is cheap to reproduce, staff are required, often at short notice, to produce data and statistics for senior management. As in the past, these requests can become routinised even when the original need for the information has passed.
This indicates that organisations should revert to the O&M principle of reducing the flow of unnecessary information, to release staff time and speed up their response to the information that really matters. Without this, problems develop with the data we do have, which I will look at in a later posting.
1. Information is costly. Back in 1968, there were no photocopiers, office computers, or emails. If you wanted a copy of a letter, the typist had to insert carbons and additional sheets of paper when she typed. There was a limit of about three or four copies that could be made this way. If you needed more, then a different process was required. The typist would type the report on specially-waxed ‘skins’, which were attached to the drum of a machine we called a ‘Gestetner’. The drum would contain thick black ink, which you always got on your hands. Both methods of copying were costly and time-consuming, and a major O&M task was therefore to reduce the amount of unnecessary information circulating round the factory. We did this by creating a flow diagram for all the routine reports generated by staff, and asking their recipients whether they found them useful. We found that many reports had begun as one-off requests by management to meet a specific need, but had then become routinised. Some reports went straight from the envelope to the waste paper bin.
This seems a lost world now because photocopiers, word-processing and emailing have successively made the production of multiple copies much easier. But this has had the effect of shifting the cost of information to the reader. People in offices now spend hours a week sifting through emails, most of which come from their seniors but are irrelevant to their work. Emails accumulate in inboxes, and the ones which require rapid attention are missed. Because the idea has taken root that information is cheap to reproduce, staff are required, often at short notice, to produce data and statistics for senior management. As in the past, these requests can become routinised even when the original need for the information has passed.
This indicates that organisations should revert to the O&M principle of reducing the flow of unnecessary information, to release staff time and speed up their response to the information that really matters. Without this, problems develop with the data we do have, which I will look at in a later posting.
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