Politics as an Enterprise System

In a review of The Social Life of Information by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, Simon Head describes:

"enterprise systems," or ES, which bring together computer hardware and software to standardize and then monitor the entire range of tasks being done by a company's workforce.

It is ES that Wal-Mart has applied to the retail economy, to the great benefit of its shareholders.

Among manufacturers, wholesalers, and retailers like Wal-Mart, ES offers obvious economic advantages. It relies on electronic tags, sensors, and "smart" chips to identify goods and components at different stages of the production and distribution chain, a practice that has brought enormous gains in productivity. Such innovations allow managers to find out immediately not only that production and distribution are falling behind schedule, but also why.

But increasingly ES is being applied to bureaucracies, white-collar business, and universities. ES technologies reduce complex human activities to a series of processes that can be mapped out and programmed by a computer. Writing about the US, Mr Head continues:

Nowhere have these technologies been more rigorously applied to the white-collar workplace than in the health care industry. The practices of managed care organizations (MCOs) have provided a chilling demonstration of how enterprise systems can affect the work of even the most skilled professionals, in this case the physician. The goal is to standardize and speed up medical care so that insurance companies can benefit from the efficiencies of mass production: faster treatment of patients at reduced cost, with increased profits earned on increased market share.

This seems to work only from the very narrow perspective of the MCOs' accounts. Patients experience similar frustrations (and worse) to those that all of us feel when ringing a call-centre - where ES is also widely used.

And what about the workers? Mr Head mentions also The Culture of the New Capitalism, in which Richard Sennett

describes how the widespread use of enterprise systems has given top managers much greater latitude to direct and control corporate workforces, while at the same time making the jobs of everyday workers and professionals more rigid and bleak. The call centers of the "customer service" industry, where up to six million Americans work, provide an egregious example of how these workplace rigidities can make life miserable for employees. At call center companies such as AmTech and TeleTech, call center companies to whom many corporations outsource their "customer relations management," agents must follow a script displayed on their computer screens, spelling out the exact conversation, word for word, they must follow in their dealings with customers. Monitoring devices track every facet of their work: minutes spent per call, minutes spent between calls, minutes spent going to the bathroom. ...

The most powerful passages in Sennett's book describe how these unnerving changes are destroying aspects of white-collar employment that he believes are essential to the well-being of workers, whether they are nurses, call center agents, bank officers, or mid-level managers at Con Edison. He describes how the spread of ES has resulted in a declining emphasis on creativity and ingenuity of workers, and the destruction of a sense of community in the workplace by the ceaseless reengineering of the way businesses operate. The concept of a career has become increasingly meaningless in a setting in which employees have neither skills of which they might be proud nor an audience of independently minded fellow workers that might recognize their value.

This is bad enough, but what happens when bureaucracy and politicians adapt ES for their own purposes? In New Zealand and Australia it appears that the independence of public servants and their ability to offer impartial and objective advice to politicians is diminishing. Policymaking becomes a top-down, hierarchical process, designed to maximise the popularity - as measured, with ever less credibility by general elections - of the ruling political party. Officials become subject to the ennui that Sennett describes. Flair and originality are discouraged, process is king. We are all Wal-Mart employees now!

All this serves to widen the already big gap between politicians and ordinary people. Slipping through the cracks are such vital but difficult-to-measure concerns as the wellbeing of society. A Social Policy Bond regime could close this gap. The key is to target outcomes that are meaningful to ordinary people. Such outcomes would be inextricably linked to people's wellbeing. Goals would originate from the public, who would be motivated to participate in politics because their views would count. Such an approach requires that politicians relinquish some of their power. Frankly, and mainly for that reason, it will be a while before it happens. But the alternative of an ever-widening gap between politicians and the people they represent and the continuing alienation of people in government service at any level from meaningful employment is too dreadful to contemplate.