Technological Change

Those charged with implementing technological and organisational change are frequently moved by the loftiest of motives.Thus in 1642, when Pascal invented the first truly mechanical calculating machine, he declared ''I submit to the public a small machine of my own invention by means of which you may, without any effort, perform all the operations of arithmetic relieved of the work which so often fatigued your spirit when you were working with the counter and the pen''.However, technology is a double-edged matter.It is rooted in Taylorism whose inventor once said ''In my system, the workman is told precisely what he is to do and how he is to do it, and any improvement he makes upon the instructions given to him is fatal to success.''Taylor called his system 'Scientific Management'.The motivations here are often quite obvious and quoted in adverts from the late 1970s ''People are trouble, but machines obey'' and ''Robots don't strike.''The range of applications of such technology is an overriding motivation.What is sad about this approach is that it squanders one of society's most precious assets which is the skill, ingenuity and creativity of its people.In this context the (late) design engineer and professor of Control Engineering at UMIST Howard Rosenbrock, wrote that computer control displays a loss of nerve and a misunderstanding as to how design and development proceeds.He pointed out that