Managing Computers in Large Organizations

Managing Microcomputers in Large Organizations
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/167.html
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PRODUCTIVITY THROUGH AUTOMATION 103
this goal we also described the rationale behind it, projected the rate at which it
could be achieved, identified the major roadblocks to accomplishing it,
developed a marketing approach to delivering the necessary automation tools,
and limned the kind of changes in the organizational culture that would have to
occur to achieve the goal.
Although this is a very ambitious goal, the company believes it must be
accomplished if Reynolds is to be productive and profitable over the next
decade. Seeking a rationale, we looked at what our salaried employees do and
recognized that information plays a very large role in their jobs. They receive
information in the form of memos or reports and store some of it, mostly in fivedrawer
file cabinets. They use salaried secretaries to retrieve it or go after it
themselves, look at it, manipulate it, reformat it, analyze it, and send it on to
somebody else. Automation can provide some support for every one of these
information processing operations. It is not going to reduce the human factor to
zero, but it can increase productivity.
Based on our projections about rates of change in cost of automation
components and people, we projected that 20 percent per year reduction in the
cost of automation components is sustainable for this decade. In the past five
years, people have increased in cost an average of 10 percent per year at
Reynolds.
In some areas we have carefully tracked what a work group was doing
before automation was applied and what was required to accomplish the same
tasks after automation was applied. In these cases we can demonstrate
improvements in productivity ranging from 100 to over 500 percent.
The major roadblock to automation lies in taking the conventional
approach to developing automation solutions to business problems. This
approach calls for custom-designed systems to solve the information
requirements of an individual or a group of individuals. At Reynolds what we
call a system typically takes about three years to develop and directly affects
about 15 people. With a limited set of resources, 150 people at Reynolds build
and maintain systems. Half maintain the old systems and half build new systems.
Using the 1980 work force as a base we assumed that the 1,000 individuals
then using automation were representative of the total. Extrapolating the
systems work done from 1977 through 1979 to the entire work force yielded a
backlog of approximately
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