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Digital: What is 2.0 colonization?

Technological progress, following its phenomenal acceleration linked to the invention of the modern scientific method, should progressively liberate us from work. This occurs in two stages: First, motorization frees up the most physically demanding tasks associated with production. Then, computing and robotics free up repetitive tasks linked to this production.

At the collective level: 2.0 colonization

However, we observe that in the current capitalist system, computing is also widely used for entirely other purposes.
First, within companies and administrations, it serves as a support for the proliferation of bureaucracy in the form of indicators that management (non-directly operational) compels production personnel (operational staff) to enter and report.
Next, between companies, as well as between administration and citizens, it is observed that the stronger party transfers its workload to the weaker one, without financial compensation and without moderation, in the form of: you must connect to my computer system, and enter such-and-such information. I call this 2.0 colonization.

At the individual level: the role of management

Let us return to the question 'How to succeed in life?', and rephrase it in the specific case of a manager in a company or administration, and their relationship with computing.

If their goal is to succeed in life, they primarily seek to advance on the social ladder. To do so, they try to escape production, which represents the bottom, and seek to progress within the management hierarchy. For this, they focus on the most effective tool: the game of alliances. Consequently, they practice 2.0 colonization and outsource computing to the IT department. The IT department progressively becomes a kind of clergy using increasingly complex tools to ensure increasingly substantial income. The main quality of selected products is notoriety, with no real connection to the needs of end-users.

On the other hand, if the manager's objective is to succeed in life, then their aim is to be supportive of real production, i.e., ground-level production. Adopting Epictetus' precept of separating what depends on oneself from what does not leads them very quickly to understand that the choice of computing tools will largely determine what depends on them. They therefore choose a computing tool that can be mastered at their level, such as Storga. The price to pay is an effort of personal learning.

The ERP myth

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It is a generic software for production tracking, 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 has its own, such as the possibility of satisfactorily adapting a gigantic generic software to a particular organization. The ERP is generally chosen on a herd-like basis, without a precise measurement of the consequences on real production and the limits of adaptability possibilities. Hence, the recourse to hierarchical pressure follows, to limit the upward reporting of problems one does not wish to face.

Deepen

Refer to the question 'What do best practices represent in the working world?'.
Read the article Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony published by John W. Meyer and Brian Rowan in American Journal of Sociology in 1977. This article predates the massive arrival of computing in organizations, but clearly illustrates the deviations linked to the social ambition effect in companies, which computing 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 production?' presents a more satisfactory organization for companies and public services, and its computing aspect.