By: David J. Wardell

© 1993 By: David J. Wardell.  Reproduction or redistribution in any form without written permission is strictly prohibited.

We rapidly are growing accustomed to thinking of personal computers as productivity tools.

Everyone in the office requires his or her own person-al computer. And a sizable number of those who travel also require a notebook computer so they can be productive on the road. All this translates into thousands of dollars for machines in the name of "productivity"

While computers make the travel industry possible, do non-reservations and non-production systems machines justify their true costs? Most people believe that their PC makes them more productive, in part because they’re so busy using their machines. The age of the PC has caused us to confuse "busy work" with meaningful work.

Maintaining disk drives and files, getting the latest compression programs to work, configuring Windows to get the colors just right and transferring files from a DOS machine to a MAC are all examples of nonproductive tasks we tolerate because our PCs have to work properly. Still worse, highly paid people waste their own time with this high-tech tinkering instead of doing something useful.

PC-based managers and executives, who were never trained as typists, do their own typing and become the company’s highest-paid bad typists. The flood of memos and documents produced by the PC exceeds anything ever contemplated in the age of the typewriter. After everyone from secretaries to executives finishes the typing, some unfortunate person has to read it.

Between the creating, the typing, the reading and the shredding or filing, PCs generate their weight in semi-useful paper every few weeks. In doing so, they have success-fully lowered the information quality of business documents overall.

PC-based analysis allows "what-if" models to be built by accountants, chief financial officers, analysts and other professionals. The models are certainly powerful tools, but they extract a heavy price from the people who build them.

Is it a good use of senior management’s time to win the award for most intricate Lotus 1-2-3 macro or largest single spreadsheet ever successfully run on a PC? Many people spend more time with the tools than they do with the analysis. Or worse, they end up believing that hard thinking about the tool is the same as thinking about the analysis.

Clearly PCs make some people more productive; for others the benefits may be marginal, even negative. The urge to buy ever better and more PCs requires that management insist upon justification for these expenses.

Where people cannot rationally explain their computer needs with more than the productivity mantra, perhaps they don’t need that laptop after all. It’s not technology heresy to ask these questions — it is just good business.