RESEARCHING THE REVOLUTION
An interdisciplinary group is investigating present and future consequences of information technology.
by Lea McLees and Rick Robinson
NO ONE CAN FORESEE exactly what tomorrow will bring, but two things are certain: Change will continue, and much of it will be linked to information technology. For those concerned about this future's myriad possibilities, perhaps the best way to prepare is to think about it.
photo by Stanley Leary
Faculty at Georgia Tech are learning the
latest in instructional technology. "There is no question that
electronic learning is going to ...
dramatically change the college educational process," says Dr. Farrokh
Mistree, a mechanical engineering professor.
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Such is the premise of "The Information Revolution: Its Current and Future Consequences,"
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"What we now know about information technology is that it's a very powerful transforming resource, leading into a whole new age," says Read, one of the project's organizers. "This age is overtaking the Industrial Age, and by the mid-21st century, the way we work, play and even the way we fight wars will be entirely different."
The book evolved out of a series of Georgia Tech undertakings organized by Read and Dr. Alan Porter, a professor of industrial and systems engineering. A year of "brown-bag" lunch meetings resulted in a commitment by more than 20 faculty members to pursue original research on the information revolution. That led to a graduate seminar on the subject, which was followed by a distinguished-speaker series. And then 10 resulting research reports appeared in the journal Technology Analysis and Strategic Management.
"Looking ahead, even imperfectly, is better than putting one's head in the sand," Porter says. "We can pick up vectors of change and their implications, reducing uncertainty by identifying powerful forces. We can help depict alternative futures and say, 'Here's a reasonable range of possibilities.' We don't know where we'll actually end up, but we can do some planning."
Below, Research Horizons spotlights the thinking of several of the interdisciplinary group's members.
More Work or Less Work?
Dr. Ann Bostrom is a School of Public Policy assistant professor with expertise in cognitive aspects of survey methodology and in risk perception and communication. Both she and Porter believe dramatic policy actions are needed to confront the effects of technology. Such changes will help the United States alter its dependence on the traditional job, and provide a better quality of life for a growing number of older citizens.
Bostrom and Porter conclude that though technology will result in job loss for many, huge changes in the jobs available, hours worked and the age and gender of workers could mean a net employment gain.
Porter, whose field is technological trends, believes that redefining work will involve broadening its practical definition to include not only volunteer and market work, but other work that society deems important — such as childcare, whether performed by a stay-at-home mother or a daycare center.
"Which job tasks is society willing to pay for?" Bostrom asks. "A lot of our cultural weave has been volunteer work, but most of the women who did that are now employed. Is society willing to pay for that?"
An important step toward such redefinition would be getting accurate estimates of the amount of time people spend working at various jobs. Bostrom is exploring methodological issues related to this question.
"People have mental models of work — of arriving at certain times, being with co-workers, doing specific tasks, taking breaks, leaving at certain times," she says. "I believe we'll find that people's mental models of work influence their quantitative estimates of how much they work."
One thing seems certain: The future will favor those with training. "It's harder and harder for people without education to get good-paying jobs," Bostrom says. "People who are at the top already in the information cycle are doing better and better. People at the bottom, without the skills or access to ways of learning them, are having a harder time."
How Efficient Is the Work?
Dr. Peter Sassone, an associate professor of economics, has done extensive studies of today's computerized companies. He found that businesses formerly focused on physical aspects of work — number of calls taken, time spent at the desk. But nowadays it is more informative to look at office work using a range of key measurements.
A diary study of a given office can help achieve the best staff mix, Sassone says. In such a study, a representative cross-section of workers log time spent over a month. Once the total amount of work and percentage done by each worker is determined, straightforward math can determine the correct staffing mix.
Companies commonly err when they try to pay for new information technology by eliminating clerical staff. They think computers will take up the slack. This is often not the case, Sassone says. In fact, Sassone studied 20 companies, none of which had optimal staffing. Usually, they had a surplus of managers.
Sassone found an expensive tendency for staff professionals to teach themselves about computers and to perform their own computer support. Companies can aid efficiency by adding computer support people to the staff.
"In many cases, my work is just verification of what people know," Sassone reports. "Few people in business want to make decisions based on emotion. This gives them evidence that confirms or denies their gut feelings, and puts numbers on what they suspected."
New Approaches for Manufacturing
"Because they provide flexibility, open systems will be the key for the manufacturing organization of 2020 and beyond," says Dr. Farrokh Mistree,
Manufacturing's future could hold economies of scope, in which cost
reductions on a product group are achieved via shared components
— versus economies of scale, which offer large amounts
of a specific product.
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"Typically, when you design a product to meet a particular need, you quickly hone in on your design, sacrificing design flexibility and creating a product that cannot evolve and meet new needs," Mistree says."The Information Revolution gives us the flexibility to postpone commitment of resources to a particular course of action until the last minute, allowing us to make better decisions about our design before the freedom to make those decisions is lost."
Competitive advantage will go to companies that provide exactly what their customers want at a low cost, says mechanical engineering graduate student Tim Simpson. He co-authored a chapter of the book with Mistree.
"When you buy a computer, do you want to buy the standard off-the-shelf model, or do you want to specify what components you want and don't want? For most people, I'd say it's the latter. . . and they shouldn't have to pay more for it," Simpson says.
Such flexibility means the future of manufacturing could hold economies of scope, in which cost reductions on a group of products are achieved via components all the products share. This approach differs from the concept of economies of scale, which today offers large amounts of a specific product.
Mistree and his students also are developing the Decision Support Problem Technique — rooted in the Decision-Based Design paradigm — for designing open systems. "It's about transforming information into knowledge that can be used by humans to design," Mistree says.
Manufacturers and their customers can expect these new directions in manufacturing research to help produce better products more quickly in the future.
Public Space, Private Space
Information technology brought us virtual reality, real-time fantasy computer games and increasingly convincing simulations, allowing us to fashion private worlds we can totally control, says Micha Bandini, a professor in the College of Architecture.
"We have entered a realm in which we don't know what is fantasy and what is not — especially in the realm of advanced technology," Bandini argues. "Today we actually possess a lot of the devices from the early Star Trek shows. But many people, I think, don't know which gadgets we actually have now, which gadgets we will have in a year and which we will never be able to have. The fantasy, the actual and the possible are blurred."
Moreover, changes in the way people live have increased this tendency to retreat into controllable private worlds analogous to the cyber world, Bandini says. Traditionally, a city was a place to go to work — it had street life, shopping, restaurants, theaters. The suburbs were a place to sleep, exercise and sometimes shop.
In recent years, however, more of life has shifted to the suburbs. The new suburban "edge cities" meet many people's needs and keep them away from the city centers, which are still the home to most of our traditional public places. A hallmark of the new type of city is the mall, which is privately owned and not always accessible to everyone. For many people, it has taken the place of truly public places, such as the downtown area, the town square and the city park, Bandini says.
The delivery of information and products to the home via computer also reduces the necessity to leave our private worlds and visit public places. The Internet can't provide a worthwhile public space for us; it is too easy to seek out what and who we want in cyberspace, she says.
Such seclusion can create problems because visits to public spaces are vitally important, particularly in a democracy, Bandini says. Public spaces prevent us from isolating ourselves from those who are different. Moreover, contact with all kinds of people is important to the socialization of children.
"One way we can learn how to deal with difference is in a public space," Bandini says. "It is much too easy to isolate ourselves, to choose who we encounter, in cyberspace and in the suburbs. Toleration of differences and the ability to compose differences is a prerequisite for democracy."
Societies need to recognize themselves; they need public realms that allow the display of socially significant symbols — from the personal level to the community and national levels, Bandini says. The full experience of a public realm cannot be achieved via digital means only.
"I believe it would be difficult for the civil rights movement to happen in 1990s Atlanta because no one is in the streets," she says.
Remaking the World Power Structure
Technology's impact will not stop with individual homes and lives; information technology already is affecting power, and ultimately commerce and politics, on the international scene.
Some of these technologies are fiber optics, computers, networks, improved human-computer interfaces, digital transmission and compression, communication satellites and cellular devices. They are influencing interactions among states, international governmental organizations such as the United Nations, multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations, such as religious movements and even terrorist groups.
"The capability to provide for the economic well-being of populations, for example, will increasingly reside with types of international actors other than states," says Dr. Daniel Papp, former executive assistant to Georgia Tech President Wayne Clough and now interim president of Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Ga. "This phenomenon is already occurring. International finance and banking have been transformed by the ability to make global electronic fund transfers at a moment's notice."
Among the future possibilities Papp envisions are:
- International governmental organizations like the United
Nations will continue to have difficulty gaining authority over nation
states' decision-making and actions.
- An integrated world banking and financial market may evolve.
- Non-governmental organizations will proliferate and become more
active, cohesive, organized and influential because of information
technology.
- State sovereignty will be increasingly challenged because of
the inability of states to control financial flows and information
dispersal.
- Distribution of wealth will be increasingly skewed within and between states.
At present, it is unclear whether information technology's influence will push society in the direction of localization or globalization, Papp says.
"Will it be the United States of America or the Untied States of America? We don't have a sufficient degree of sophistication to know which will eventuate," he says. "Right now, it appears that globalization is winning."
Openness to change, at both the individual and cultural level, is an important and unpredictable factor with major influence on the world's future, Papp says. "Cost and system reliability are important, but they are irrelevant if you are not going to use a machine that is put in front of you."
Papp believes the next step is to try to manage change assertively to move toward desired outcomes. To that end, he and David S. Alberts of the Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University (NDU) have written The Information Age: An Anthology on Its Impacts and Consequences. NDU published this multi-volume work last year for congressional offices, military officers, the academic community and others interested in the impact of information and communication technology on international change.
"The only way to manage change is to think about what possible changes technology might bring about," Papp says. "We have to think about where technology might drive us, and then we have to share that information with decision-makers.... One of the big problems with academics has been that they've been doing a great deal of thinking, but not sharing it with the outside world."
The Tech interdisciplinary group, expected to adopt a formal name soon, will continue with its information revolution research after its book appears. In another initiative, the newly formed Georgia Tech Forum on the Information Enterprise of Tomorrow is working to develop stronger links between the College of Computing and the School of Management. This effort will help computer science graduates be more aware of business computing concerns, while making the management student more informed about technological issues.
Other Tech initiatives addressing the information revolution include an important symposium on April 6-7 at Georgia Tech's Ferst Theatre. Former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, IBM CEO Lou Gerstner, CIA Director George Tenet and many other business and government leaders will take part in a national summit on information security.
For more information, you may contact Dr. Bill Read, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0345. (Telephone: 404/894-0826) (Email: william.read@pubpolicy.gatech.edu); or Dr. Alan Porter, Technology Policy and Assessment Center, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30332-0205. (Telephone: 404/894-2330) (Email: alan.porter@isye.gatech.edu).
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