INFORMATION 'OUT OF CONTROL'

Information Technology lowers working output

For the last 20 years the cry in architecture has been, 'Clear the way for information technology!' The results are everywhere in the shape of increased floor heights, air conditioning, false ceilings, raised floors, enormous risers and so on. But now a sudden reversal seems to be taking everyone by surprise, even though the cause is common knowledge.

Everyone who works in a modern office knows that work is something that you have to do out of office hours, because in office hours you have to deal with information. The problem is ancient, but nowadays electronic office equipment makes it so easy to send a message that everyone, from rocket scientists to checkout persons, has to be taught to restrain their urge to communicate. Even then the emerging scale of the problem suggests that such education may be useless. According to a study recently carried out by American office equipment manufacturer Pitney Bowes, the average office worker now deals with 190 messages a day in the form of 52 telephone calls, 48 e-mails, 22 voice mails, 21 letters, 15 faxes, 11 post-it stickers, 10 telephone messages, 4 written notes, 4 overnight delivery packages and 3 cellular telephone calls.

Pitney Bowes describes this avalanche of distraction as 'highly disruptive', but that is surely too circumspect. University of Chicago researcher Carstairs McKillop, in the throes of his own study of information overload, has no hesitation in going further; 'We have all gotten used to thinking that the biggest threat to employment comes from automation,' he says. 'But now it looks as though we have been wrong. Automation has already peaked out. The big threat to jobs now comes from non-task related information, and that is mushrooming because exactly those employers who slimmed down and informationalised their workforce in the 80s and 90s without regards to the disruptive effect of uncontrolled information, are finding out now that their skeleton staffs either can't do the job, or burn themselves out trying. Hiring more people doesn't help because it simply generates more disruptive information. Unless something is done, nine to five as we know it will become untenable.'

McKillop claims that declining employee efficiency is hitting the new purpose-built Call Centres of the United States and Europe like a tropical disease. In these massively informationalised structures 1,000 or 2,000 employees with open access to TFE (Telephone Fax and e-mail), may require almost as many supervisors to restrain the disruptive effect of their urge to inform and be informed.

What can be done? Surprisingly the survival model cited by McKillop is the one adopted by Microsoft years ago when the firm was still small. Then Bill Gates commissioned Seattle architect Gerry Gerron to design the original 'starship' headquarters complex. Gates wanted symmetrical buildings hidden among trees and landscaped like a university campus, with everybody in their own office, all the same size: nine feet by twelve feet by eight feet high. The way he saw the future of Microsoft at that time, 420,000 square feet of these cubicles, plus parking for 1,700 cars, would provide expansion space for the firm for ten years. How wrong he was can be seen at a glance today.