The Internet and productivity

This is something I think about a lot. Well, I don`t spend my days pondering "The Internet and Productivity" (I should be so lucky), but it often strikes me that this is something we need to think about more.

Companies are grappling with the incessant requirement to be wired versus the very real experience that email is really all you want for your employees.

It`s a problem, let`s face it. On the one hand we attend visionary conferences and we talk about the knowledge worker, this wired person who wouldn`t have a job without the vast information and communication resource that is the Internet. On the other hand, we get a lot of companies phoning us for Internet access services, and they are all scared about losing employee productivity to lunch-hour surfing and clandestine pornographic pleasures. (I thought I had to mention "pornography" somewhere since this column is called "The Naked Net".)

There is a wonderful Dibert cartoon (Dilbert is important reading for all geeks and can be found at http://www.unitedmedia.com/comics/dilbert for those who haven`t bookmarked him yet) in which Dilbert`s boss tries to get him to do something and Dilbert refuses by pointing out that his boss had no idea what he (Dilbert) is currenty busy doing. Surely, the boss`s request can`t possibly be more important. The boss eventually assigns the task to Dilbert`s colleague. Dilbert`s cubicle neighbours later ask him what he was actually doing, and he responds, "Playing Solitaire."

The Internet, besides other things, has become the Solitaire of the late 90s. The world over, companies are grappling with the incessant requirement to be wired versus the very real experience that email is really all you want for your employees, and absolutely not a stitch more.

Of course, a lot of this conflicted thinking is informed by the - sad but real - truth, which is that there isn`t much truly useful business information on the Internet. Or at the very least it`s not obvious, pre-packaged, gainfully accessible by people who aren`t trained to access it. Which is of course what business is waiting for. Ideally, the Internet would come on a set of well-idexed CD-ROMs, priced at a couple of hundred Dollars. "Insert Internet disk #4 now."

The thing about productivity and the Internet is that it takes a special kind of person to access the Internet and actually produce business value by doing so. This is not to say that you should now consider firing all your employees and starting again, but it`s really an issue of the kind of culture you should work towards engendering in your organisation. Okay, let`s take two steps back and then a big one forward: while I`m not saying that you should radically make your company `technology-driven` (I actually happen to think that that`s usually bad business practice), I believe it`s necessary to train and encourage your workers to perform more and more of their daily tasks using technology.

For instance, where you once wrote memos, encourage email. Where you once used the phone to schedule an appointment, encourage usage of a collaborative scheduling program. Where you would previously have asked a competitor for their annual report in order to gain business intelligence, look at their Web site.

People need to be given the tools for becoming knowledge workers first, but they also require guidance and encouragement in using them. It`s when your workers understand that spamming the whole staff mailing list with a stale joke isn`t okay that they`ll stop doing it. The Internet, as well as company networks, are marvellously self-regulating, but that is only possible if you have `seeded` things in such a way that they`re growing in the right direction in the first place.

Pornography and gratuitous Web browsing on the company network is a little like going to work in a chocolate factory. My mother, while she was a student, worked in a chocolate factory. When she first started, she was told she could eat as much as she wanted, whenever she wanted. After two days of stuffing herself, she stopped eating chocolate for years. Overload is usually the best medicine. If the "porn problem" persistently affects the work performance of an employee, then that person probably has problems that need addressing on a slightly deeper level than simply blaming it on the Internet. Hint: speak to your HR manager.

Censoring employees` access to Web sites or browsing altogether is in fact counterproductive, although it may seem like a really good idea as a short-term fix. If you look at this option from the IT manager`s perspective, it makes perfect sense: email-only connectivity costs less, makes it seem as if your company is on the Internet and to top it all, nobody will hang him because productivity has dropped off due to browsing. It seems like a great all-round solution.

In South Africa, we always assume that we`re a little behind, and of course - practically speaking - that`s often true. And while we have some of the most amazing brains of the world in this country, we also have masses of people who don`t have access to education, computers or the Internet. Why is this? A partial reason, I think, relates to the way we are taught in SA schools. We`re taught not to solve problems or address issues by applying thinking tools; we`re taught to "learn" accounting, languages, science. We "learn" (by heart) facts, not tools. At best, this eventually makes us into relatively decent specialists.

I think now that it is becoming easier for most South Africans to enjoy access to educational facilities, it`s also become high-time to change our curricula towards teaching what I call, "tools not facts". These tools are what will eventually enable us to become knowledge workers - which the way of the world seems to indicate is what we should be turning into.

And some countries are booking down successes. India, for instance, is one of the world`s premier software development sites, as labour there is cheap, educated, English-speaking and - one assumes - very employable as programmers. South Africa could do this too. Our businesses can become as wired as those in the developed countries, if only we ensure that technological facilities such as the Internet come "bundled" with the proper education and guidance - guidance towards their usage as tools, not as a collection of facts.

Trying to grasp the Internet as a set of facts completely misses the point. And this misapprehension is also the reason why productivity is lost when South African companies introduce the Net into the communications mix