Corporate ‘1984’ May Intrude About 10 Years Late

For a glimpse of where management is heading in an increasingly technological world, don’t just look to the casual campuses of Silicon Valley corporations. Instead, pay close attention to America’s largest bureaucracy and how it’s been analyzing the horror of aerial fratricide.

The lessons here offer a sobering preview of how “knowledge workers” will do their jobs in the coming decades.

The tragedy of errors surrounding the accidental shooting down of two U.S. Army UH-60A Black Hawk helicopters over Northern Iraq in April by two U.S. jets was painfully detailed in a 21-volume report recently issued by the Pentagon. Defense Secretary William J. Perry described the report as “profoundly disturbing.” Gen. John Shalikashvili, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, found the details to be “shocking.”

Of course, this report will trigger essential reforms of the military command and control system. But what makes this analysis so provocative won’t be found in the thoughtful details of future recommendations but in the comprehensive details of the disaster itself.

Between computer consoles, audio recordings and the videotapes, practically every meaningful gesture and decision during the incident was captured, recorded and documented. From conversations between the E-3A AWACS controllers and the F-15C pilots to what was on the radar at any given time to the video of the downing of the helicopters, these professionals were under constant monitoring and surveillance. Their decisions--whether good or bad, intuitive or analytical--would become part of an immutable record. Privacy means nothing here.

This high-tech environment of highly trained individuals collaborating in the context of vital communications is the prototype for tomorrow’s high-performance organizations. The social, economic and technological trends all point to multimedia monitoring as an integral management tool. The cost of capturing data continues to plummet; enterprises are increasingly becoming networked via electronic mail, and top managers insist on knowing what’s going on at any given moment.

The same high-tech infrastructures of surveillance that have become an essential part of the military seem destined to be replicated by organizations comparably concerned about mission analysis.

“What do welfare recipients in Los Angeles, IRS workers in Washington and senior partners at New York law firms have in common?” asks Marc Rotenberg, director of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center.

He worries about whether AWACS standards should apply to desk-bound executives: “Three years out, they will all be part of high-tech organizational monitoring efforts. . . . Unlimited data capture is what the modern workplace increasingly provides for management. The more sophisticated the organization, the more likely it will want to do things like keep tabs on electronic mail and computer systems usage.”

Traditionally, Rotenberg observes, companies thought nothing of using electronic surveillance techniques to monitor lower-echelon employee performance. In the name of assessing productivity, telephone company supervisors eavesdrop on their operators; software counts the number of keystrokes per minute of data entry workers.

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What with massive managerial layoffs, the proliferation of low-cost digital technologies and the need to better assess productivity, white-collar “knowledge workers” are becoming just as vulnerable to electronic surveillance as their blue-collar counterparts.

“Surveillance is creeping up the ‘org’ chart,” Rotenberg says. “This is the next generation of the punch clock, but I don’t think people really appreciate yet the level of depth and comprehension of the data collection these technologies can manage.”

Then again, society thinks nothing of putting flight recorders and black boxes in jetliners flown by highly skilled commercial pilots. In fact, society insists on it.

Given the multibillion-dollar shenanigans in Wall Street trading firms, why shouldn’t a Kidder Peabody or a Salomon Bros. insist on recording conversations on trading desks or tracking software manipulations on computer consoles?

Indeed, consider that the health care economy makes up over 15% of the nation’s gross domestic product. Health care is a field ripe for extensive electronic surveillance. The stakes are life and death, and medicine has a healthy tradition of record-keeping. Intensive-care units are electronically monitored. Extending that network to other parts of a hospital should be cost-effectively straightforward. Similarly, videotaping operations and using digital-compression techniques to store the tapes might also make economic sense. Indeed, the insurance companies and malpractice lawyers of tomorrow may insist on it.

“When there is a compelling health and safety need, there is a reason for electronic surveillance tools,” acknowledges Evan Hendricks, who edits the Privacy Times. “But generally, making your people live in a fishbowl is highly stressful and counterproductive.”

However, the technologies to monitor and track is becoming so cheap and easy that it’s understandable why organizations will use them. Just how much time is that auditor spending on those electronic spreadsheets? Why does this copy editor spend so much more time per story than that copy editor? Why does this senior manager send out proportionately more electronic mail--but get so little in reply?

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Yesterday we couldn’t answer those questions cheaply. Today we can. Tomorrow we can monitor even more for less.

Is Orwell’s “1984” making its corporate appearance a decade late? There’s no way of knowing yet. But just as the Pentagon now depends on its multimedia autopsies to prevent future disasters, these new media of surveillance are destined to be on the job along with us.