Toward the Electronic Office (1981) / Chapter Skim
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General Discussion
General Discussion
Pages 89-100
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From page 89... ...
We, at the Institute, do have programs for standards in local area networks and computer based office systems, mostly having to do with extending the options you have in terms of being able to interconnect equipment and exchange media. We are not in the area of doing human factors experiments at the moment, although we hope we will get to that level sometime.
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From page 90... ...
Question: I am from the Department of Justice. In looking at the figures which divided up what people were doing in terms of tasks and how that was affected by office automation and how the amount of time people spent doing their work was affected, two things struck me.
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From page 91... ...
There is another time factor that I think John Hogan would agree with that is probably five or six percent of a workers total time. I agree that any time you try to quantify what people do, they are going to respond and fill those hours up with work rather than say they are not working full time.
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From page 92... ...
It is a new phenomenon when everyone in the bank could be angry at you simultaneously. Power loss is a very serious consideration and that is why we went to the two generating stations and are looking now at what kind of computer power backup we should provide on an ongoing basis.
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From page 93... ...
I run Europe and all of our branches out of our Chicago main data center. We have looked carefully at availability and continuity of operations because that is a big concern to us.
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From page 94... ...
We recently went back and looked at all of the documentation that was considered to be confidential and, really, about l5 percent of the total should be confidential and the other 85 percent should not be, so there is the reverse issue as well. We also looked at what resource we spent shredding confidential material and it turned out to be two full time people.
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From page 95... ...
Possibly, even getting away from the nine to five type of atmosphere. In the few brief seconds that we have left, could someone address office automation along the lines of the psychological standpoint of possible changing work habits of people?
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From page 96... ...
However, the issue that we spent a lot of time discussing, especially considering location independence, is how about running a pilot with a commercial officer working out of his home in Denver, never coming into the bank other than to sales meetings. We have some documents assembled on that.
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From page 97... ...
So, people who communicate exclusively electronically can actually start getting a little bit weird about what is going on, and they have to be called in and reminded of the good will of people that they have been communicating with at the office. So, for all of those reasons, although I would love to be able to work at home part time, I wouldn't like to work at home all of the time.
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From page 98... ...
I guess in response to the comment, I don't think that is true because what happens -- in fact, what we are finding with a lot of people using the electronic communication -- is that they are freeing up time and having more personal interactions during a given work day because the mundane activities are getting handled through audio mail and electronic mail. It is not like a programmer sitting behind a terminal.
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From page 99... ...
I conceded my summary time to this discussion because the discussion was lots better, but there is this matter of the bets and 5 o'clock and I have to protect my bank account. On the subject of working at home at the computer, my wife tells me, "I married you for better or worse, but not for lunch." So, I travel 30 minutes to get to my l8,000 bits-per-second connection with the computer instead of the measly l,200 I have at home.
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