Abstract
The four decade old Productivity Puzzler (sometimes called the Productivity Paradox) asks why the massive investment in information technology (IT) is not accompanied by equally massive productivity improvements. The belief that IT does improve productivity is foiled by faulty measurement, but improved measurement will, at some point, demonstrate conclusively that IT improves productivity. Another view is that “Productivity Vampires” use IT to suck productivity out of organizations through mechanisms such as moving the goalposts, making things not forbidden required, and increasing cognitive load on workers.
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Notes
It was called the Productivity Paradox, but paradoxes are absurd, self-contradictory or counter-intuitive propositions that, if capable of being proved true, might be “apparent paradoxes.” The Productivity Puzzler might be the Productivity Apparent Paradox.
The concept of IT and the “undead” has been explored before (Su et al. 2018)
An instrumental IT user is one who uses IT to get work done when that work is not fundamentally about IT. See Kling (1978).
We live here, too, and are unlike “[T]he idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, all centuries but this, and every country but his own…” (Gilbert and Sullivan 1885, Act 1)
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King, J.L., Ehrenberg, A.J. The Productivity Vampires. Inf Syst Front 22, 11–15 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-019-09943-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-019-09943-9