I‘d like to pursue my last topic a little further. Since my last column was three months ago, I hope you recall that I talked about the issue of measuring computer ‘productivity’ vs. computer ‘effectiveness’. I made what I hope was a strong point that I see way too many computer solutions, from the desktop to the mainframe that are neither productive nor effective. As a consultant I review many different Pick shops in a large number of various industries and this observation seems to hold true across the board.

I’m not of course picking on Pick – the impetus for that last article came from a column written in the 3/31/97 issue of InfoWorld and unfortunately, they rarely mention Pick. I think the problem is an issue of how we under utilize the current information technology in the business world, and I agreed with the author Bob Lewis that we should spend more time concentrating on being effective with our technology.

I recently received another good indication that I’m onto something important here when I ran across the article "Taking Computers to Task" in the July issue of Scientific American. I highly recommend that every MIS manager run out right now to find and read a copy of this article. It is not a ‘scientific’ article but rather a thought provoking exercise in reviewing the history and perhaps the future of computers.

It contains some very interesting facts that raise similar concerns to my previous discussions in these columns. For example, it points out that over the last 25 years, businesses have had a virtual love affair with computers and information technology. They estimate the total US expenditure for IT (hardware, software, networks, training, and support) to be about $500 Billion dollars in 1996 alone. Computer and telecom already represent the single largest piece of American industries capital budgets at an astounding 43 percent, and future expectations are to continue to spend more and more of the overall capital budget on IT.

Yet there are indications the love affair is truly virtual. If the computer is really the productivity multiplier its always been touted as, where are the results? Labor productivity growth rates have dropped dramatically in the last 20 years. In the seven largest industrial countries, productivity growth averaged about 4.9 percent a year from 1960 to 1973 but only 1.8 percent a year from 1973 to 1995, even as IT spending has been skyrocketing. More interesting is that the US was dead last in growth, even though we’re unarguably first in computer usage.
Clearly lots of that money is spent foolishly and lots of IT individual projects go awry. There are always a few high profile horror stories around, but the Standish Group estimates that overall almost a full third of all computer projects that corporations build are canceled or rejected as unfit for use. That’s astounding. Take a look around your organization. Are you doing better than this? If not, why not? Certainly with a database as flexible as Pick, our community should be able to run rings around these numbers.

The article points out several horror stories of their own. It claims US hospitals have gone from a patient to administrative staff ratio of 3.21 in 1968 to 0.71 (yes - that’s less than one patient per administrator!) in 1992 "in large part because information processing consumed an increasing amount of staff time". They confirm estimates of total yearly costs for a desktop PC of from $13,000 (Gartner Group) to as much as $23,000 (Nolan Horton Institute, Aust.). They also point out that the industry bias is to obsolete desktop software every 11/2 to 2 years by bringing out ever bigger, more bloated software applications, which in turn force the obsolescence of the hardware as well.

While their take on coming technologies such as the World Wide Web, speech recognition, video conferencing, virtual reality applications, and autonomous software agents are cautious to highly negative, there are some bright spots. So how do you find the killer applications? The ones that makes or keeps your company competitive?

The secrets seem to be a number of themes you’ve heard here in this column over and over again. Think through to the goals of the processes. Mindless automation of existing processes will rarely truly improve difficult workflow issues. Automate what the user is trying to accomplish, not what they are doing today. Be innovative. Ask what the computer can do automatically without asking the human, or better than the human because it has all the required information available.
The user interface is one of the primary keys. If the user can’t learn and understand the visual interface in from minutes to a very few hours, they won’t be able to use it effectively. An intuitive, clean, dumb screen with a field at a time interface is probably still easier to design and easier for people to learn. This is why you constantly find yourself becoming frustrated with GUI’s and why even today I feel strongly that desktop PC’s for everyone in the organization is overkill. On the other hand, if you can design a GUI as clean, easy to use and futz free as your dumb terminals, go ahead – just make sure that from a user perspective, you "make their day" and not the opposite.

None of this is in any way a generic indictment of the PC. All the interface concerns, horror stories, and design issues apply equally to department and enterprise systems. And there are certainly good and valid uses for PC applications in any business. But at the total yearly costs of ownership above that seem now to be fairly accepted numbers, be sure the user really has a cost effective use for the PC.

One key to Pick’s success and longevity is our outstanding flexibility. We can design applications to fit our businesses and modify them when the need arises better and faster than the competition. Our total cost of ownership, once perhaps 1/3 of everyone else’s, is even better in comparison now. Today’s Pick implementations CAN interface to all the current technology such as PC, GUI’s, bar code readers, hand held and wireless input devices, and whatever the next generation of technology throws at us.

Lets remember the other primary reason Pick has always been a better solution – the data model allows us to get closer to the real world. Closer to the way a user thinks and acts, intuitive and easy to learn. Good design will allow us to continue to capitalize on these strengths for next 20 years while the other databases struggle forward in an attempt to match our total effectiveness. Lets keep making their goal harder to reach!