Re:Technology is Neutral. (Score 1)

I agree, though part of it is a shift in business/corporate culture. I've talked to people who were working engineers in the 50s and 60s, and when they were given a project, they got the resources they wanted, and an "assistant" to bring coffee and sandwiches, do the typing, etc. They were expected to produce, but mostly within the bounds of the problem itself.

Now, about a third of the actual work time spent on a project at my company is spent on "discovery" -- a little bit of requirements definition and figuring out how the proposal will affect other systems, and a lot of writing documentation that may be looked at again and mostly just answers the same semi-important questions over and over without helping much. And we do our own typing; no making lists of notes and handing it off to someone to "prettify". And we answer our own phones. And we get interrupted at least once per day for a meeting, at least half of which we're merely showing the flag at.

I'm not bitching, exactly, but it shouldn't be a surprise that we feel like we're accomplishing less, when in fact we're spending less time accomplishing things.

Management is relevant to this, in that everytime someone decides that it'll reduce headcount to get rid of a secretary, that makes a difference. But it's also in matters like the meetings. Marketing won't just tell IT that it needs a system to automate a task, they'll decide they know how to do stuff and show up with a proposal from a (usually shady) vendor for this Great New Thing, and if half of IT isn't in the meeting, it's "not an IT priority", so they'll go ahead and buy it so they don't have to wait for us. Never mind that they just extended the timeline of the task themselves by (a) requiring that they be ever so gently disabused of the notion that their Great New Thing is Great or New, and (b) pushing out other priorities by dragging people away from their work and into meetings that don't need to be there, postponing how long until we can possibly work on their issue.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but respecting the chain of command might not hurt -- they tell their VP that they need thus-and-such a system with whatever deadline, their VP talks to our VP and they hash out priorities for themselves, and then our VP tells us what to do.

But instead I get dragged into a lot of meetings where nothing that happens affects me, and then waste even more time pissing and moaning about it on /. Oh, the humanity!