Only training can make new technology productive

IN AN attempt to be a digitally savvy, modern kind of parent, I tried to get involved in Minecraft, the virtual building-block world into which my children seem to have disappeared recently. I turned out to be hopelessly inept at it.

 

I am not bad at computer games in general. I can still beat my seven-year-old son at retro games such as Mario Brothers, and I am regularly drafted in to babysit my daughter’s virtual Littlest Pet Shop animals.

But I am struggling with Minecraft. My blocks scatter randomly, I dig holes when I mean to build walls and I am bothered by the pixellated sheep that wander up to stare at me.

My son has built a replica Viking village in Minecraft, while I cannot build a row of bricks in a straight line.

My daughter laughs out loud at my efforts. My son is more encouraging. "Don’t worry," he says, his fingers sweeping balletically over the tablet screen. "I was like that at the beginning. You just have to practise lots."

I’m not sure I am willing to invest the number of hours my son puts in — he would, if allowed, spend every waking hour on his Minecraft town. This is not compatible with raising a family and holding down a full-time job.

However, it made me think about the cost of acquiring new technology and the productivity paradox. This is the inexplicable finding that investment in technology does not, in fact, seem to increase productivity.

From the early 1970s to the early 1990s, corporate America invested heavily in computers, but productivity — which up to then had been rising — took a dive. And productivity has been similarly depressed recently, despite the introduction of smartphones and the internet into our working lives.

Economists, who have been struggling with this conundrum since Robert Solow first wrote about it in 1987, have four theories for what causes it: there are productivity gains, but we just do not measure them correctly; some individuals and companies make productivity gains, but these come at the expense of others — so there is no net gain; there is a time lag before productivity gains show up; and there are no productivity gains because information technology is so hard to manage.

Anecdotal evidence from almost any office supports a number of these theories. Time lost to fixing computer problems, for example, is familiar and significant.

Last year, a study by Aalto University and the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health found that public sector workers waste, on average, four hours a week troubleshooting computer problems. That is a productivity loss of about 10%.

My money is on a combination of theories one and three being the real answer.

We have not so much miscalculated the output as the input. We are simply not honest enough — with ourselves and with our companies — about what it costs to learn to use new technology.

I can baulk at investing hundreds of hours in becoming proficient at Minecraft, but I do not have this luxury of choice when it comes to the dozens of new technologies adopted in the office in the past few years.

Some may doubt Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that 10,000 hours of practice — about 416 days — are what is needed to become an expert. But what is indisputable is that the average number of hours of training time companies provide for employees each year is very far short of this, more typically in the high 20s or low 30s.

Only once in my life have I been on a technology training course of any substantial length — for two weeks, when I first started at the Financial Times.

Everything else I have learned since then has come in sporadic, hour-long workshops, or on the job, and I am not sure anyone has calculated the true cost of that.

Learning on the job is not cost free. When I pull a busy colleague away from their spreadsheet analysis to troubleshoot my technology issues, I am pretty sure productivity suffers for both of us.

One of the reasons why an honest calculation of technology costs does not happen is fear. At 40, I am right on the outer edge of the age at which I can express reservations about technology. In a few more years, I suspect, I will not dare to, for fear of being labelled someone who simply cannot keep pace with modern life.

At that point, fearful of being marginalised in today’s often ageist office culture, I will feign enthusiasm for a poorly performing technology platform rather than question its adoption. I will not admit to needing help to figure out a new tool — I will just quietly not use it. Or use it poorly.

And then the company — and the economists — will wonder again why the gargantuan sums spent on technology-procurement are simply not paying off.