Technology Old, Technology New

For managers at all levels of business and government, and apparently in various nations around the globe, the phenomenal growth of the new cyber-technologies has been accompanied by a growing frustration with the question of how these technologies might effectively be integrated within existing technological and cultural structures.

Part of the difficulty has been managerial: ensuring that the new technologies neither duplicate nor undermine those that already seem to work successfully. And, if you think this problem is restricted to the United States, you might want to think again.

Try registering a motor vehicle in Tokyo, for instance, and, at any given Division of Motor Vehicles, you might be asked to stand in no less than 4-5 lines, in 4-5 different buildings, before being asked to pay for your license to a clerk who calculates your change on an abacus (called a soroban, in Japan) . . . i.e., a 3,000+ year old hand-held, wooden calculation tool. Try mailing a letter from the local Post Office and you’ll likely find the clerk using the same contraption — while a perfectly good calculator sits on her desk, ignored. The abacus was in use centuries before the adoption of the written Hindu-Arabic numeral system and is still widely used by merchants and clerks in China and elsewhere. For those interested, here is an excellent discussion and explanation of how the soroban/ abacus operates.

The point here is neither to highlight nor further distinguish the old from the new — but rather to ask whether, and if so how, the two might be effectively integrated for the future. Clearly, a topic as vast and as complicated as this cannot properly be addressed in the space that is here provided. Therefore, I can only hope to frame the question open-mindedly, as one of possible inclusion/ integration, rather than as one that callously presumes to detemine which of the two is the more efficient, as if that criteria alone might best/ objectively determine which should be excluded from further serious consideration.

Cyber-management creates the possibility of decentralizing the nature and control of work, allowing managers to swap secured data between disparate agencies, or to conduct videoconferences and training programs via internet-linked computers. Massive networks such as these can increase the productivity of management and staff by saving money for their agencies, and in that way, for the general public. Multiple fee-based networks can, for instance, be consolidated into one free Intranet, allowing state agencies, local governments, libraries and other institutions to share data quickly and securely

Over the long haul, it is possible to see how organizations, both public and private, could become synonymous with their information systems. The “way of cyber-management” is to organize work across geographic and political boundaries. Cyber-management makes it possible to organize without having a physical structure in place at all, or for that matter, without incurring the capital costs that adhere to such structures. The “way of the abacus” is to incorporate thousands of years of cultural and political history; to document the apparent preferences and choices made by a given people over time, choices that will remain worthy of serious consideration because, and if for no other reason, they have served to

Where traditional management is animated by information and decision-making systems that are highly programmed, hierarchical, rational and pre-planned, cyber-management is animated by systems that are flatter, more questioning, flexible and ad hoc. The latter incorporates an element of “critical thinking,” and because of this more critical context, cyber-management provides managers with more room for exercising their years of experience, wisdom, intuition and personal judgment in the achievement of agency goals.

So, what does this have to do with Japanese government officials processing driver’s licenses with an abacus? Not much, and that’s the problem — perhaps, it should. This probably seems rather preposterous to the average American — even the idea of trying to integrate the fast and furious flow of modern information within ancient technologies. But, not so fast.

Some interesting questions have been raised for public managers and how they carry out some of their normal functions, now that cyber-technologies have, seemingly forever, changed their working environments. For many of these questions, traditional (for lack of a better word, “American”) management does not provide easy answers, though it appears the answers may have as much to do with the securing and training of qualified personnel as with the securing and installing of network protocols that make provisions for security. For example, managers now need to establish not only that their employees are technically proficient at using the agency’s Internet services, but that these services are not mis-used by outside intruders.