The politics of productivity redux

It's been said that politics is the art of compromise. Therefore anything and everything has a political aspect. But I would maintain that the purchase, implementation, and management of business and manufacturing systems is especially so, and, in fact, involves politics on a global, national, corporate, and personal level.

Ernesto Zedillo, former president of Mexico and current director for the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, recently said, "The notion that globalization could be stalled or even reversed might seem odd, given that its basis is in technology advances that won't go away. But actually and fundamentally, political decisions allow globalization. Those decisions could be reversed, and so could globalization."

On a national level, outsourcing—or, more precisely named, offshoring—has become a matter of intense political debate. But even if globalization delivers greater good to a greater number of people over the long haul, those who feel the "short-term" pain will be the most motivated to use politics to redress the balance.

This is despite the fact that worldwide job losses in manufacturing over the last seven years are the same as in the U.S.—11 percent. Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, has written, "The fact that global manufacturing output increased by 30 percent in that same period confirms that technology, not trade, is the primary cause for the decrease in factory jobs."

Even so, technology-driven productivity gain is, in itself, a political issue for governments and corporations.

It seems no matter who I talk to about IT implementations, I'm invariably told that the two most important factors bearing on success are executive sponsorship and employee buy-in. Executive backing is needed to give weight to the push for change and to adjudicate disputes. The rank and file can't be left behind, though, because no matter how effective the command structure in place, peer pressure invariably reigns as a stronger force. When people love what they do—and many of us learn to love our work—we tend to resist change.

In user case examples, a politically correct technology vendor never explicitly says a project led to head-count reduction, but instead says that it allowed workers to be assigned to more strategic tasks.

Another politically charged issue within a corporation involves ROI. On a macro-economic level, there's a general consensus that productivity gains following from IT investment have been demonstrated. On a personal level, we know computerization has transformed the way many types of work are done. Yet, for a given IT implementation, it can be extremely difficult to quantify benefits following from IT. There are many reasons for this, but what it means is that even the expected gains of a project must be negotiated.

Thus we arrive, at last, at the purely personal. And that is, if you, despite all the hyperbole and controversy in today's marketplace, believe that the correct use of IT in business and manufacturing systems, improves productivity and increases competitiveness—and in the long run provides a greater good to a greater number of people—then you must be a champion within your company for it.