At about the same time, roughly five percent of industrial power in the US was supplied my machines, 79 percent by animals and 15 percent by humans. A century later, 84 percent of that power was provided by machines, 12 percent by animals and four percent by humans.
As we embark on the 21st Century, computational power is having a similar effect. Teleworking, services automation, business process computerisation, workforce virtualisation and any number of approaches aimed at using technology to increase productivity are playing an increasingly important role in contemporary business operations.
Whereas the agricultural and industrial revolutions largely replaced the manual with mechanical, the computational revolution, which we are currently experiencing, is replacing the mental labour which characterises the services sector with the virtual production capacity.
Where then, is the place for humans in this emerging equation?
Traditions of telecommuting
Every week, 1.1 million Australians log-on to their virtual offices via the Internet to complete a range of tasks from a customer's worksite, a field office, an airport lounge or the comfort of their own homes. In the US, up to 30 million people from a wide range of industries is taking advantage of telecommunications infrastructure to log into a virtual office and work from a remote location.
And while most people would trace its origins back to the popularisation of the Internet in the early nineties, telecommuting had its origins four decades ago, when Jack Nilles brought rocket science back down to earth.
"I was working with NASA looking at ways to communicate with astronauts on the moon, when a town planner asked me why we had the technology to put man on the moon, but we couldn't think of a way to get people off the freeways," Nilles explains.
Driven by this vision, Nilles left NASA and began to busy himself with more earthly concerns. By 1973 Nilles had convinced a Los Angeles company to conduct a teleworking trial, with spectacular results.
"Workers were all connected to dumb terminals, so they could operate during the day and then dump their work on the mainframe at night via a wideband connection," Nilles explains. "Productivity went up, facility costs went down and people didn't leave as often so it seemed like job satisfaction increased."
Given these positive results, it is a wonder it then took another three decades before telecommuting became popularised, and why it continues to meet with resistance.
"The biggest problems, then and now, are simply management attitudes," Nilles says. "We have to figure out a way to get management over the edge of their innate terror that if they can't see people, those people couldn't be doing their work."
Toni Robertson, faculty reader in human computer interaction at the University of Technology Sydney, believes management holds the key, not just to the successful implementation of telecommuting but to a range of work practice possibilities opened up by technology.
"The mistake often made with telecommuting, and other types of technology, is the adoption of a blanket approach rather than a more complete engagement with the situation," Robertson says, pointing to the need for technology to be implemented in such a way that it expands an employee's creative input rather than excluding them from the creative process. "When designing technology we're actually designing people's work and the way they are able to be in the work place."
Robertson believes the process of computerisation is often made more complex by a disconnect between the people designing and implementing new technologies, and those who work with the technology to carry out certain tasks. This has come about, she contends, because the process through which new technology is implemented in the workplace is dominated by evangelists - whose role is to present the technology as a cure-all - and management, whose task it is to minimise costs.
"There is often a failure to factor in the articulation work, or the work you need to do in order to fit your work into the procedures which are specified by the technology," Robertson says. "Computers have developed in a certain kind of way which isn't natural. There were clear decisions made about the direction it took and what it was designed to achieve and the actual technology users were often not included in this process."
Hi,
Working as an IT contractor i've worked for quite a few clients on jobs that easily could have been done remotely.
The unfortunate reality i have found is that bosses want to see you sitting at a desk in their offices otherwise they don't seem to consider the work being done.
Just my 2 cents..