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Digital: What is colonization 2.0?

Technological progress, following its phenomenal acceleration linked to the invention of the modern scientific method, should gradually free us from work. This is done in two stages: Firstly, motorization which frees the hardest tasks physically linked to production. Then IT and robotics which free up repetitive tasks linked to this production.

At the collective level: colonization 2.0

However, we see that in the current capitalist system, IT is also widely used for all other purposes.
First of all, within companies and administrations, it serves as a support for the proliferation of bureaucracy in the form of indicators that management (not directly operational) forces production people (operational staff) to grasp. and bring it back up.
Then, between companies, as well as between the administration and citizens, we see that the strongest tend to transfer their workload to the weakest, without financial compensation, and without moderation, in the form of: you must connect to my computer system, and enter this or that information. I call this colonization 2.0.

At the individual level: the role of the manager

Let's start again from the question 'How to succeed in life?', and let's rest it in the particular case of an executive in a company, or in an administration, and his relationship to IT.

If his goal is to succeed in life, then he seeks above all to progress on the social ladder. To do this, he seeks to get out of production which constitutes the bottom, and seeks to progress in the management hierarchy. To do this, he focuses on the most effective tool, namely the game of alliances. As a result, it practices colonization 2.0 and outsources IT to the IT department. The IT department is gradually becoming a sort of clergy that uses increasingly complex tools to ensure increasingly substantial revenues. The main quality of the selected products is notoriety, with no real link to the needs of field users.

Conversely, if the manager's objective is to succeed in life, then his objective is to help with real production, therefore on the ground. Adopting Epictetus' precept of separating what depends on oneself from what does not depend on oneself leads him very quickly to understand that the choice of computer tools will largely determine what depends on him. He therefore chooses an IT tool that can be mastered at his level, such as Storga. The price to pay is a personal learning effort.

The myth of ERP

ERP is the acronym for Enterprise Resource Planning. This is generic production monitoring software, more or less adapted to each branch, then to each company or administration. The most famous of them is called SAP.

Capitalism has its myths, such as trickle-down, computing its myths, such as the possibility of satisfactorily adapting gigantic generic software to a particular organization. ERP is generally chosen on a herd basis, without precise measurement of the consequences on real production and the limits of adaptation possibilities. Hence the use of hierarchical pressure to limit the escalation of problems that we do not want to be confronted with.

Learn

Refer to question 'What do good practices represent in the world of work?'.
Read the article Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony published by John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan published in American Journal of Sociology in 1977. This article predates the massive arrival of IT in organizations, but clearly shows the excesses linked to the effect of social ambition in business, which IT has only amplified.

Read chapter 15'The technological revolution of digital and robotics' from the book From capital to reason.

The question'What is Lean Manufacturing?' expose une organisation plus satisfaisante pour les entreprises et les services publics, et son volet informatique.