Chapter 15
The technological revolution of digital and robotics

In chapter 6, we saw that the two most specific elements of our time are on the one hand the Earth which has suddenly become the limiting factor in our development, giving rise to the ecological problem, and on the other hand the second industrial revolution, that digital and robotics. The challenge facing our generation is therefore naturally to adapt our social organization to this new environment.
We have just seen in the previous chapter that the ecological transition involves moving away from the logic of growth. We will now show that the digital revolution requires rethinking digital tools and training, to really make them available to the operational organization of work.

Emergence of a new tool of oppression

Marx noted that when machines arrived in the workshops, instead of this being liberating for the workers as one might expect, it resulted in greater work stress. Exactly the same thing happened with computers. For what ? Because the massive investments, therefore the center of all capitalistic attention, go to the machine which aims to replace the muscle in Marx's time, to the computer system which aims to replace the brain in ours. People are seen in both eras as simple adjustment variables awaiting future automation. History repeats itself at this level.
However, if the capitalists understood the technological revolution of the moment in the same way in both eras, the result was not necessarily the same. In 1987, Robert Solow was surprised that the massive arrival of IT in companies at the beginning of the 1980s was not reflected in the statistics of productivity gains, which would subsequently be called Solow's paradox. The explanation that seems most credible to us is that while finding good organization around mechanical machines has proven reasonably simple, the same is not true around computer systems. Indeed, with mechanics, or paper bureaucracy, the simple visual observation of the flow of goods or forms allows you to get a good idea of u200bu200bthe current level of organization, and to imagine improvements to streamline production. With IT, it's much more abstract because we don't directly see the progress of the files. You have to build a mental image based on simple indicators. Furthermore, when developing an improvement to streamline or simplify production, it is extremely difficult to understand the level of difficulty linked to the implementation of each option.

In fact, for the moment, IT has been an accelerator of the problems described in Chapters 2 and 3, namely the establishment of a formal organization disconnected from reality, as described in the article by Meyer and Rowan, and the inflation of unproductive prestige workforce, as described in Parkinson's law.
Indeed, in practice, computer science has introduced a third system of organization, in the form of activity modeled generically in computer software, which is added to the formal system described by Meyer and Rowan, a side of the informal organization which ensures real production. However, the emergence of this third system causes operational staff to lose their autonomy and become incapable of coordinating naturally and flexibly as they did before, due to the simple fact that the necessary IT changes do not follow or are simply not possible. This leads to a proliferation of givers of good advice of all kinds, which ultimately means the acceleration of Parkinson's law.
This phenomenon is further amplified by recent technological developments, namely the development of instantaneous means of communication such as email and then the mobile phone with its mini messages and other collaborative tools, which make people reachable anywhere and at any time. Indeed, the fact that information circulates more quickly has favored the establishment of longer and longer chains, and has therefore constituted another powerful factor favoring the aggravation of what Parkinson describes, namely the inflation of positions that are not really productive, where we simply distribute the real work.

On the organizational level then, IT has been an accelerator of the division into silos of the company, since each new software creates a new silo, which contains only part of the information necessary for the functioning of the organization. , and which he guards more or less jealously, which any problem log reveals very quickly.
Here again, web technology, with the emergence of multiple online services, has worsened the situation. Indeed, companies, faced with the drift of their organization linked to unsuitable IT, overwhelmingly conclude, following analyzes which do not take into account the sociological dimension, that it is their internal IT that they do not know well. manage, or which is too costly. They then seek to outsource it to the cloud. The effect is a greater fragmentation of data, therefore a worsening of inconsistency problems as the number of services used increases, with the final consequence of a further acceleration of Parkinson's law, i.e. -meaning the proliferation of tasks without a direct link to the organization's purpose. Computer software, cloud or not, is a bit like medicine: too much medicine ends up poisoning the patient due to poorly controlled drug interactions.

Finally, at the inter-company level, each company or administration seeks to set up a website on which it encourages or requires its customers, suppliers and citizens to enter or collect information (1). The local effect, for the company or administration, is to transfer the administrative cost outside, without transferring the corresponding remuneration, so it is extremely motivating. On the other hand, at the community level, the net effect is a considerable loss of productivity. Indeed, on the one hand, each company, instead of having to manage a uniform administrative flow corresponding to its activity, finds itself having to manage multiple administrative micro-flows corresponding to each of its customers and suppliers, with the impossibility of optimizing anything due to heterogeneity. On the other hand, once the company or administration has outsourced - distributed to its customers and suppliers - the administrative cost, this having become painless for it, nothing limits its propensity to ask for ever more information, to power its own multiple non-production stages, which can proliferate all the more easily.

Let us recall at this stage that poorly mastered Parkinson's law translates in practice into bloated management which intensely practices generalized nepotism, and pressured operational staff, therefore a high level of stress everywhere, that is to say the progress which ultimately leads to oppression.

The choice of computer system

We saw in Chapter 4 that strategic choices regarding the IT system are among the most egregious examples of weak or inept reasoning. We mentioned the massive recourse to social support, to which is added the cognitive bias of overconfidence seen in Chapter 3, as well as that of asymmetry in risk-taking before and after the initial choice.
However, the consequences of these choices are both very important due not only to the initial investment linked to the development or acquisition and implementation of integrated management software for example, but also and above all to the effect on the general organization, and therefore ultimately on the social climate. Very concretely, if too many problems lead to a need to adapt the computer system, then the adaptations are not made, and the constructive exchanges also stop in favor of a simple power relationship, it is that is to say generalized nepotism.
Paradoxically, trade unionism has not taken the measure of this issue. There is no demand for quality from management in the decision-making process, and simply confrontation once the problems are there... and it is too late.

This means that IT strategic choices must be more than all others subject to a rigorous methodological evaluation, as proposed in the second part of this book, simply because their consequences are serious and currently not seriously anticipated.

IT under control

Let's move on to the solution now. Previous chapters have shown how to reunify the formal organization with the practical organization by adopting a structure that ensures that the effective organization remains connected to the purpose, and optimized according to the practical problems encountered. However, the search for the causes of the acceleration of Parkinson's law under the effect of the arrival of IT has just shown us that the source was always the loss by operational staff of their ability to flexibly and continuously modify their organization. . Let's see how this very concretely impacts the functioning of the new organizations that we presented in the second part of this book.
In the problem log (chapter 9), at the level of the 'Solution' box, what is important is that the complexity of the modifications to be made in the computer system, and the difficulty in accessing the additional information which would have been necessary to prevent the problem from recurring, do not mean that the obvious solution of adapting the computer system is, in practice, almost never applicable.
In the same way, in the journal of strategic reflections (chapter 10), a major issue is that the constraint of computer systems which cannot in practice be adapted to the needs does not become what leads strategic reflections to become simple searches for tips without long-term sustainability.
In other words, the danger is that IT produces the same effects as a meddlesome administration. Hence the importance of the paragraph 'Restoration of room for maneuver' in this same chapter 10.

Let us now study what is currently preventing operational staff from maintaining control of their IT tools.
First of all, on a technical level, IT tools have diverged, either downwards or upwards, making them in all cases unsuitable for direct and effective use by operational staff. Towards the bottom first of all, we witnessed a sort of gold rush of consumer tools for consumers, whether web services, messaging and other social tools, which have become intuitive and largely mastered, but are not production tools. Towards the top then, the development tools have become considerably more complex, making them unusable by non-specialists. Finally, in the middle, business software presents the same limits of lack of adaptability as consumer software, without retaining its intuitiveness. The cause is that decision-making buyers still believe that the quality of software is linked to the number of features, instead of understanding that true quality lies in the possibility of simply adapting it when the problem log reveals inadequacies. with real activity.
In terms of training then, we simply abandoned the objective of training an honest digital man in favor of an employability objective. In fact, the training followed the divergence of tools downwards and upwards. At the bottom, we train en masse in tools such as word processing and spreadsheets, which do not allow us to set up an effective organization. At the top, we continue to introduce programming in classic languages, which will not provide effective autonomy to non-specialists.

The solution is therefore the adoption of medium technology, which allows automation, while remaining controllable by properly trained operational staff. This requires moving towards a homogeneous IT system instead of seeking to interconnect multiple specialized software, so that the automatic grouping of all the information necessary for each activity remains easy. In other words, good IT is nothing more or less than IT which does not oppose the proper functioning of organizations, and in particular the journal of problems and strategic reflections, and this simply supposes selecting technologies adapted for this purpose, instead of selecting technologies adapted to IT development isolated from production.

At the inter-company level now, it is necessary to define a single standard for the exchange of digital documents (2), understandable by the honest digital person, such that a digital flow is strictly equivalent to a paper flow.
In addition, it is appropriate to impose that any operation possible via access to the website of the company, administration or organization, must also be possible automatically by sending or downloading a few clearly accessible digital forms.
The goal here is that the boundaries between organizations do not become areas where work foreign to the organization's purpose proliferates, because complexity and unnecessary heterogeneity would prevent operational staff from operating effectively. the principle of continuous improvement that we presented in the second part of this book.

Ultimately, what the Solow paradox teaches us is that in the case of digital technology, what is humanly desirable in terms of organization, because it promotes the autonomy and responsibility of employees, is also desirable in terms of point of view of pure operational performance, because it is one of the conditions for an effective problem log.

Digital policy

America, being the leader in consumer IT services, logically experienced this gold rush by looking more at commercial benefits than at the limits in terms of productivity gains missed in other sectors. On the other hand, Europe has remained insignificant on the digital level simply because it has not been able to promote products adapted to honest operational men. She was content, on the one hand, to try to copy the model of Silicon Valley startups, forgetting that copying with fewer resources is rarely a winning strategy, and on the other hand, she was content to want to regulate through the legal, that is to say return to the method suggested by Marx in Capital.
Cognitive dissonance did the rest by making it possible to disseminate the idea that communicating more and faster can dispense with thinking about the organization, with in the end a policy that is insignificant from the point of view of regulating the pressure on operational staff, and therefore a return to social clashes.

The key to the digital challenge is therefore a resolute training policy to overcome digital illiteracy, and this supposes selecting technologies and protocols adapted to the honest digital man, instead of continuing to adopt technologies already selected by the market , i.e. targeting either downwards at the digital consumer or upwards at the digital specialist, with the end effect in all cases of worsening Parkinson's law and the resulting stress level .

(1)
Many companies are no longer sending documents, such as invoices, with digital technology. Instead, they send an email like “We inform you that we have made such and such a document available in your personal space. » Translated into plain language, this means “Come and get it.” ".
The fact that the legislator does not call to order the organizations which, during the transition to digital, cease to fulfill their obligation to send an invoice, is representative of the effects of digital illiteracy: since lawyers do not master digital technology, they underinvest in it, and it tends to become an area where force is law.

(2)
Any form must be available in readable form, for example a PDF file. It is exclusively made up of elementary fields and tables. Each elementary field has a name. Each painting has a name. Each column in each table has a name. All these names are unique and must appear in small letters right next to the boxes in question.
The exact JSON encoding of the document is canonically established from the names on the readable version. The detail of specifying this canonical JSON format is beyond the scope of this work. Here, only the principle of such a format interests us. Additionally, for clarity, an example file should be made available in addition to the readable version.
Regarding transmission, in an ideal world, the readable form would indicate the mailbox address or submit it in digital form. However, due to technical limitations, we prefer to indicate a URL (a web address), and the document will be submitted using an HTTPS POST request, with basic user and password authentication, and return. 'a document acknowledging receipt. In the event of rejection, the HTTPs error message must indicate the name of one of the problematic fields, or if it is a field in a table. the triplet table name, row code, column name.
For access to information, it's almost the same: we send a form specifying the desired information, and we receive in return not an acknowledgment of receipt but a response form in JSON form.
Finally, it is up to the community to standardize a certain number of these forms, that is to say precisely define the fields and their names, to further facilitate exchanges.