Management speak in IT

The contribution of IT to management speak does not just consist of technical jargon. That has its place. The contribution explored here is different: IT-speak. The logic of IT-speak is to try to legitimate management principles and practice. It does this by applying the terminology of technology to the social world of the workplace, the firm and the population. IT-speak is summoned to give capitalism good cover; but the more it is summoned, the more it threatens to undermine the legitimacy of IT.

I saw the ad in the Sunday Times. In cool blue type and sea-green bullet points, a firm that I shall call ABC Data Corporation was on the hunt for client services directors and programme directors. The headline was ‘Building futures, enabling freedom to grow’. It went on:

Talent is the driving force of ABC Data. Our 30,000 employees pay testimony to that across the globe. Talent needs freedom and continued stimulation to achieve maximum potential and ABC Data provides a challenging task focused environment in which skills are developed.
ABC Data enables its clients to focus on the future by maximising the value of their technology and to enhance interaction with their customers by providing solutions and services for infrastructure and E-business.

I had wanted to apply. But exactly what ABC Data did, I could not divine. So I didn’t apply. All I know is that ABC Data is a European company. It also has a solid brick office just down the end of my road, as well as an interplanetary logo.

As Information Technology (IT) gains a more central place in the life of every corporation, so the description of the background, experience and personality expected of ABC’s kind of recruits is likely to form part of broader requirements of staff in the corporate world. According to ABC, these requirements include:

Background and Experience

Exceptional “blue chip” Customer Relationship Management
Strategic Value Selling and Bid Management
Programme Management of IT Projects and Services
Managed multi functional matrix teams
Rounded IT understanding
Variety of industry experience
Full P&L responsibility (1)

Person

Method led Programme/Project Manager
Entrepreneurial goal oriented relationship builder
Well developed inter-personal and presentation skills
Demonstrable record of success within the IT market
Minimum of 10 years commercial experience.

Apart from the reference to managing blue chip corporate customers, and the demand for success in IT and 10 years commercial experience, job specifications like this are being sent out, right now, to aspiring recruits around the whole world. Which junior member of staff is supposed to have no interest in Customer Relationship Management? Isn’t a humble operator at a call centre meant to engage in Strategic Value Selling and Bid Management of a sort, and certainly be an entrepreneurial goal oriented relationship builder?

IT companies and the Internet itself are powerful conduits for management speak. But in penetrating the general workplace, IT has become more than a conduit. At work, the language of IT has come to perform more than a simply technical or engineering function.

Self-deprecating jokes abound, within the world of IT, about techie speak, the language of propeller-heads and the inarticulate nature of enthusiastic men in anoraks. Especially since William Shockley’s invention of the transistor in America in 1948, technology has been a powerful source of neologisms. But there is nothing very wrong with technical terms like applications or broadband. It would be better that they are accessible, unambiguous and did not consist of ugly abbreviations. (2) However every discipline suffers from a vocabulary that has its faults.

No, the contribution of IT to management speak does not just consist of technical jargon. That has its place. The contribution explored here is different: IT-speak. The logic of IT-speak is to try to legitimate management principles and practice. It does this through the inadmissible procedure of applying the terminology of technology to the social world of the workplace, the firm and the population.

Take the term ‘cyberspace’, first popularised by the novelist William Gibson. Once the movement of electrons down pathways to nodes was conceptualised as a fully-fledged network, it soon became a kind of parallel universe with its own laws. Not long after that, markets became IT-like spaces in their own right. ‘Cyberspace’ gained a wider currency in commercial circles as one of a number of ‘spaces’. Thus International Data Corporation, a top firm of IT analysts, today proclaims:

Dell are more focused on SME growth, which is slow but solid. The enterprise space is where the major growth will be. IBM have renewed their focus on the Intel space while Compaq has more of an installed base in enterprise. (3)

First, IT-speak gives IT the privileges normally afforded to physical space. (4) With that move, the Internet becomes not a product of culture, but rather an autonomous culture in itself. Newsgroups, chat-rooms and the like form a separate playground for anthropologists – what Christine Hine has called ‘a naturally occurring field site for studying what people do while they are online’. (5)

Then, IT-speak moves on quickly to represent capitalism itself as a system of spaces. The prefix ‘cyber’ vanishes, but a lame and conveniently neutral metaphor, ripped off from physics, comes to dominate thought. Power relations between different human forces are stripped of social significance and imbued with the qualities of nature.

IT-speak turns debatable social processes into unquestionable technical ones

Like engineers in the 1920s and 1930s and atomic physicists in the 1950s, management writers who are drawn to IT believe that the future will largely be determined by it. They repeat that innovation in IT is speeding up; that there is no stopping it, and that it is the animating ‘driver’ of the future. As a result, they promiscuously apply the language of IT to management issues.

First of all, IT is held to redefine the structure of the firm. As early as 1992, well before the Internet was mass public knowledge, Davidow and Malone published a US management bestseller titled The Virtual Corporation. (7) Here the specialised computer term ‘virtual’ was made a metaphor for the whole future of business organisation. (8) Firms, like virtual storage in IT and also like film companies, would assemble their resources from outside as required, and appear bigger than they really were.

It was a neat trick. For once firms become virtual, then frictions within them become a thing of the past. Management policies are inviolable, because they are merely the outgrowth of technological necessity. Management is not about power, but about using IT to assemble the right resources in a timely manner.

There is a second way in which IT-speak – particularly around Silicon Valley, which is currently enjoying a revival – rids management of its social side. IT-speakers like to cast the corporate creation of value, the rivalry between firms and also the evolution of the Internet in the naturalistic terms of biology. In a nod to the other great technology of the 21st century, genetics, people whom Paulina Borsook has described as ‘technolibertarians’ have a special habit of representing the future of business as a Darwinian affair. As she puts it in her critique of the IT milieu’s fascination with ‘bionomics’, for right-leaning technolibertarians:

economic life flourishes when technology marches on, accelerated by competition. Here innovation equals genetic mutation, and competition equals natural selection. (9)

The metaphor is biological – indeed complexity theory, Stuart Kauffman and the Santa Fe Institute are never very far away. But the advocates of this fatalistic account of the evolution of business are much noisier in the world of IT than they are in the world of biotechnology. One need only think of the public obsession with computer viruses – protected, in an architectural metaphor, by firewalls – to see how IT-speak uses the language of epidemiology to turn human actions into an infectious disease. (10)

IT-speak anaesthetises discussion at one final level: that of society as a whole. It is 40 years since Fritz Machlup helped his more succinct successors coin the phrase ‘knowledge economy’. (11) Yet today, commentators continue to press on us all the same old technocratic, one-dimensional IT-speak. From mainstream economist critics of IT in America to the European left’s own management guru, Manuel Castells, experts mint anew the phrase ‘network economy’. (12) For them telecommunications networks, linked to computers, have brought about an entirely new mode of production. British savants are no better. Anthony Giddens insists on the ‘information revolution’, while Will Hutton strikes a studiously electronic note when he imagines that ‘we are now living through a quantum leap’. (13)

The further away commentators on IT are from the real hard graft that dominates the world of IT, the less they know about it. But that does not prevent them always trying to position themselves, with IT-speak, as ahead of the game. They want to be the first to see society as determined by a new technical base. It is a GCSE kind of Marxism that removes politics to the arid plains of superstructure – to the realm of ‘policy’.

Tony Blair has announced that ‘stability is sexy’. For all the dynamism invoked by IT-speak, its sociology of business institutions, national wealth creation and the future works so as to mummify management. Political choices are not part of its agenda.

IT-speak reinforces myths about individual empowerment and team-based collaboration

Where IT-speak does profess a political outlook, it deploys the lexicon of what Thomas Frank has named ‘market populism’. (14) President Bill Clinton invoked the reputed demise of the mainframe computer as part of his account of the post-Cold War epoch. He saw the rise of computer power at the desktop and in the pocket as parallel to the end of top-down, Soviet-style central planning. Admitting that it was a cliché, Clinton nevertheless announced that human beings had entered ‘a PC world’.

In this perspective, IT-speak paints involvement in IT as a bottom-up, democratic, empowering affair; not only at work, but also in elections, the arts and general discourse. (15) At the same time, IT-speak favours sideways collaboration within and between organisations. Here it is group-wide telecommunications, more than personal computing, that form the focus. In combating Al Qaeda, the US military now speaks of ‘network-centric warfare’. (16)

At work, teams have a long history. In the 1990s, they gained prominence as a

• Means by which to organise a rational division of labour (17)
• Vehicle for learning at work – aided by a ‘free flow of meaning among equals’ (18)
• Chance for conviviality and recreation. (19)

However, ‘virtual teams’ – aided by telecommunications and cutting across the boundaries of space, time and organisations – have also gained a special popularity. (20)

Now: work teams can take different forms. (21) But whatever their composition, teams have received an enormous morale boost from IT-speak. As alumni from the notorious RAND Corporation have put it,

When there is synergy between teams and information technology… the contribution of the two to knowledge and organizational performance is greater than the sum of the parts. (22)

Altogether, IT-speak represents a kind of plebeian liberation theology for workers in the developed world, and also in countries such as India. To get online is to gain personal freedom. To collaborate in a virtual team is to participate in a sort of post-Cold War socialist idyll within the capitalist corporation – egalitarian, dynamic, meritocratic.

IT-speak here confuses the technical potential that IT has as a means of doing things better and more collaboratively with the social relations that obtain between individuals within and between firms. These relations are frequently authoritarian and competitive, not collaborative. From the Financial Times, Robert Taylor is not alone in pointing out:

The modern office is much easier to run with surveillance. Team working provides internal group pressure that may tighten rather than loosen time constraints. (23)

The modern call centre is all about IT and teams. But it is also all about using IT to measure individual worker performance so closely that FW Taylor, the father of time and motion study, would blush. IT-speak ignores all this. Drawing on the ‘sociotechnical systems’ (STS) approach pioneered after the war by the Tavistock Institute in London, IT-speak wants to align workplace needs, skills and relationships to workplace technology, and optimise both. Inevitably, however, it is the technical side of workplace organisation that is held to provide an unassailable argument for teamwork.

More than 50 years ago, the Tavistock announced that new technologies at the National Coal Board appeared to be ‘stressing the value of the strongly-knit primary work-group’. (24) But as Thomas Davenport perceptively observed of IT in 1994, ‘assuming that different departments, professionals, or line workers will want to use technology to share information is one of the biggest mistakes executives make’. (25)

Sharing, like empowerment, is a fine ideal. In suggesting that IT networks intrinsically lead to education and collaboration at work, IT-speak removes conflict to the arena of personal sloth, anti-social behaviour, bad leadership and ‘PC rage’. Just as everyday life has moved from friends to ‘networks’ and ‘networking’, so every member of an IT-based team is, in principle, a helpful friend.

IT-speak idolises customers and users, but believes that they are supplicants in need of help

IT-speak talks up a touchy-feely world of empowerment and collaboration not just inside and between firms, but between firms and their customers. As we saw, ABC Data’s first requirement of a recruit was excellence in Customer Relationship Management.

In IT-speak, the interactive nature of the Internet ensures that it is customers, more than the firm, that can and should now determine the nature of the firm’s offerings. Thus an IT practitioner’s treatment of IT-assisted marketing sensibly criticises ‘silver bullet’ IT solutions, but still insists that the future belongs to what it calls ‘a child of the new economy’, namely the ‘relationship-based enterprise’.

From this point of view, the task of the corporation is to use IT to share information once again, but this time led by customers and users. (26) It is to build introduce common terminology and values among customers, let them strut their stuff, help them be part of the in-crowd, and Create a Great Total Customer Experience for them from Scratch, as the British Web bank egg plc has done – or so we are told. (27) Equally, customers with mobile phones are the ‘center of the m-commerce universe’, and one must ‘put together many legacy data bases into one coherent whole middleware system’ to gain more information about how to retain them. (28)

This worship of the power of customers is really worship of the market. But that does not exhaust what IT-speak has to say about customers. Customers are in need of Microsoft Help, of helplines and of helpdesks. They need everything made very simple for them, in the manner of Steve Krug’s Don’t make me think: a common sense approach to Web usability. (29) As a virtual community, customers and users need real support.

Here, IT-speak reveals itself as the Prozac it is. Behind B2B (business-to-business) and B2C (business to consumer) e-marketing lies a more sinister trend: T2V – the dispensing, through IT, of Therapy to Victim.

IT-speak relativises knowledge

In 1994 Peter Drucker, the doyen of management gurus and an early enthusiast for IT, announced that knowledge had become so vital to the ‘information economy’ that firms needed to pool together multiple ‘knowledges’ to survive. (30) More recently learndirect, the UK’s largest publicly funded e-learning network and partner of the government’s University for Industry, has attacked the six hours a week that it says people ‘waste’ making tea and coffee. Instead, it wants to help people fit learning into their lives with ‘cuppa-sized’ educational sittings as short as 10 minutes. It proposes:

• In 3 cuppas, you could learn How to Prepare a Budget (30 minutes)
• In 6 cuppas, you could learn Time Management Skills (1 hour)
• In 12 cuppas, you could learn Presentation Skills (2 hours)
• In 26 cuppas, you could learn How to Manage your Personal Finances Effectively (4 hours and 15 minutes) (31)

As Drucker and learndirect show, the effect of IT-speak is to make all kinds of knowledge equal – or equally trivial. Wisdom and insight are elided into knowledge, which in turn is elided into information and data. Learning universal truths through experimenting on the real world is downplayed; instead, in a vocationalism that sits well with New Labour education minister Estelle Morris, knowledge takes the form of the different ‘skill-sets’ held by different people and acquired, most obviously, over the Net.

For all the talk, then, of the knowledge economy, IT-speak relativises knowledge and, in the process, demeans it.

Conclusion: IT-speak makes it harder for IT to be used in the cause of progress

IT-speak is not merely a discourse that is used to allot resources, to evaluate and to order. It also affects to be modern. To object to IT-speak is to be told that one is an elitist reactionary, incapable of moving with technology, the times and The People.

The promise of IT-speak is of ‘solutions’, never technical fixes, and still less problems. The promise is also that different hardware and software systems will be compatible or ‘interoperable’: in no other walk of life – not even tailoring – is the adjective ‘seamless’ so frequently and unthinkingly deployed. IT is, too, always ‘scalable’: a system that works in Lilliput can always be made to work in Brobdingnag.

When general management prevails on IT people to give it the strategic direction it feels it has lost, the promises are reassuring to both sides. But when, for a variety of reasons, the promises are not delivered upon, IT-speak holds the business of IT up to ridicule – and not just from the boardroom, but also from the general public.

That is tragic. I have argued that yesterday’s ‘irrational exuberance’ about IT should not be replaced by today’s irrational pessimism about it. None of the arguments here should be read as hostile to IT. What I object to is the corralling of IT and IT terms into the world of management in a way that represents the latter as an immutable process, akin to Fate.

Computers are universal machines. As they have spread, so has IT-speak. For if the movement of electrons cannot be seen, the sensation and – less often – the reality of productivity improvements brought about by IT are tangible enough. As a result, IT-speak has acquired the status of a religious catechism. Those who appear to understand the invisible electronic world are dignified as sagacious priests of the visible, physical one.

Once workers and customers experience difficulty with IT, however, the high priests of IT-speak are unfrocked. The call centre is revealed for what it so often is – a rage management centre. ‘Intelligent’ systems are exposed as further evidence of that old and highly accurate software programmer’s adage: Rubbish In, Rubbish Out.

The danger that IT will be discredited by IT-speak is not confined to the private sector. New Labour is obviously incompetent to bring the power of IT to bear on sorting out basic government services. Like its enthusiasm for electronic electoral processes, New Labour threatens to make public servant, taxpayer and voter attitudes toward IT much more cynical than they should be.

The situation is more ironic than any postmodernist could imagine. Paradoxically, IT-speak is summoned to legitimate capitalism – but the more it is summoned, the more it threatens to undermine the legitimacy of IT.

References and footnotes

(1) P&L: profit and loss. P&L responsibility means that you have kept a division, department or whole company in the black.

(2) A useful but by no means infallible dictionary of IT terms is available on Whatis.com. See http://whatis.techtarget.com/

(3) IDC analyst Mark Melenovsky, quoted in Caroline Daniel, ‘Dell seeks new routes for its lean machine’, Financial Times (2 April 2002), 22. SME means small and medium enterprise. The enterprise space: clients that are large corporations, as distinct from SMEs. The Intel space: machines with Intel chips in them.

(4) For a recent example of this thinking, see Institute of Public Policy Research, Code Red (London, IPPR, 2002).

(5) Hine, Virtual ethnography (London: Sage, 2000), 18.

(6) Ibid, 3.

(7) William H Davidow and Michael S Malone, The Virtual Corporation: Structuring and Revitalizing the Corporation for the 21st Century (London:  HarperCollins, 1992).

(8) Virtual: in IT, an adjective first applied to that computer memory which appears to be inside a system but in fact lies outside it.

(9) Paulina Borsook, Cyberselfish: a critical romp through the terribly libertarian culture of high tech (London: Little, Brown & Company, 2000), 32.

(10) IT-speakers murmur about the merits of viral marketing: see Jupiter Media Metrix, Viral Marketing – Message Ultimately Trumps Medium (June 2001). However, the potency of the virus metaphor is not confined to IT-speakers. New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell has made a bestselling career out of the notion that ‘Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do’: see his The tipping point (London: Little, Brown & Company, 2000).

(11) Fritz Machlup, The production and distribution of knowledge in the United States (Princeton: University Press, 1962). For more on the history of IT-speak characterisations of society, see James Woudhuysen, ‘Before we rush to declare a new era’, chapter in Geoff Mulgan, ed, Life after politics: new thinking for the twenty-first century (London: Fontana Press, 1997), on http://www.woudhuysen.com/before-we-rush-to-declare-a-new-era/

(12) Carl Shapiro and Hal R Vardan, Information rules: a strategic guide to the network economy (Harvard: Business School Press, 1999). For a useful overview of Castells, see James Crabtree, ‘The cult of Castells’, Prospect (February 2002).

(13) Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens, eds, On the edge: living with global capitalism (London: Vintage, 2001) 20, 21.

(14) Thomas B Frank, One market under God: extreme capitalism, market populism and the end of economic democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000).

(15) See James Woudhuysen, Cult IT (London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1999), on http://www.woudhuysen.com/digital-visions-cult-it/

(16) Alexander Nicoll, ‘Computer wins Afghan battlefield spurs’, Financial Times (6 February 2002).

(17) Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith, The wisdom of teams: creating the high-performance organization (Harvard: Business School Press, 1993.

(18) Peter Senge, The fifth discipline: the art and practice of the learning organization (London: Random House Business Books, 1993).

(19) Harvey Robbins and Michael Finley, Why teams don’t work (London: Texere Publishing, 2000).

(20) Jessica Lipnack and Jeffrey Stamps, Virtual teams: reaching across space, time and organizations with technology (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997).

(21) Teams can be ‘functional’  (marketing may make a team work on a project before handing it over to finance). They can be ‘cross-functional’ but ‘lightweight’ (members come from different functions, but remain under their respective functional managers), or even ‘heavyweight’ (members act as general managers and focus only on the project). See Clayton M Christensen and Michael Overdorf, ‘Meeting the challenge of disruptive change’, Harvard Business Review (March-April 2000).

(22) Don Mankin, Susan G Cohen and Tora K Bikson, Teams and technology: fulfilling the promise of the new organization (Harvard: Business School Press, 1996).

(23) Taylor, ‘The truth about time sovereignty’, Financial Times (2 August 2001), 14.

(24) E A Trist and K W Bamforth, ‘Some social and psychological consequences of the longwall method of coal-getting’, Human relations (London: Tavistock Institute, 1951) Vol 4, No 1, p38.

(25) Davenport, ‘Saving IT’s soul’, Harvard Business Review (March-April 1994).

(26) Ray McKenzie, The relationship-based enterprise: powering business success through customer relationship management (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 2001).

(27) Patricia B Seybold and Ronni T Marshak, Customers.com: how to create a profitable business strategy for the Internet and beyond (New York: Times Books/Random House, 1998).

(28) Douglas Lamont, Conquering the wireless world: the age of m-commerce (Oxford: Capstone, 2001).

(29) Steve Krug, Don’t make me think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (Indianopolis: Que, 2000).

(30) Drucker, ‘The age of social transformation’, Atlantic Monthly (November 1994), 68.

(31) ‘It’s time to dunk your brain not your biscuit’, learndirect press release (21 February 2002).