December 29, 2006: Organizational "Health Maintenance"

I would like to continue to explore the point I raised on December 26 to the effect that enterprises need "health maintenance," rather than "illness treatment." Obviously, if an organization is in a pathological state, then that pathology needs to be treated; but there are (at least) two aspects of health maintenance that are likely to facilitate treatment.

1. There is the need to cultivate an awareness of pathologies, since, as if often the case with human patients, it is often (frequently?) the case that the organization does not know when it is in a pathological state.
2. There is also the need to cultivate preventative measures: An organization that is aware of a potential pathology is better equipped to "nip that pathology in the bud," dealing with it before it has a serious impact.

So how do we implement such measures for an organization? In medicine we know about the physical examination and the frequency with which it should be performed (having now "graduated" to an age where I have to have mine annually). However, this time scale is to coarse for the world of business. An enterprise functions on the basis of ongoing business processes, and those processes need to be monitored in the course of their functioning. IT is now in a position the make sure that such processes are running reliably and accurately; so this is the first step towards making the health maintenance metaphor "work."

However, such monitoring cannot be conducted for its own sake. The data generated by monitoring drives the formulation of hypotheses that address detecting, diagnosing, and treating pathologies. Some rather interesting visualization technology has gone into "driving" dashboard displays that deliver monitoring data; but the hypothesis data generated by managers at all levels of the enterprise are equally important to health maintenance. When a hypothesis is posed, it will (almost?) always need to be vetted by several managers throughout the enterprise; so we need some kind of "dashboard visualization" to provide awareness of the current "state of the hypothesis space" and facilitate the vetting process.

How can all of this take place? In his book Images of Organization, Gareth Morgan addressed this question by bringing another metaphor into play:

The formal analysis and diagnosis of organizations, like the process of reading, always rests in applying some kind of theory to the situation being considered.

In other words the real purpose of visualization, of both monitoring data and hypothesis spaces, is to enable managers to read their organization, a concept that inspired the subtitle of James Taylor's fascinating book on organizational communication. I would further argue, to draw upon another previous discussion, that we are talking here about a literary approach to reading, rather than any kind of objective or analytic one. In the context of another favorite theme, managers should be able to think about the people in an organization as subjects rather than objects. The danger of visualization is that it serves up abstractions that entail excessive objectification, but this danger is more likely to add to any looming pathologies than to deal with them.

This then leads to my final point, which is the recurring question of whether or not tools such as Wikipedia and Google are eroding our skills for being critical readers, whether of texts or of organizations. We are more interested in tools that deliver answers, and reading is not necessarily about delivering answers. As I previously suggested, sometime one has to go "roundabout" the questions; and literary reading enables such "roundabout" thinking. This may take more time that finding an answer from a search result or a Wikipedia entry; but, where the health of an organization is concerned, getting to the most effective answer is more important than getting there "efficiently."

December 26, 2006: "Clinical" IT

I would like to continue my thoughts on the question of whether or not there is a suitable academic foundation for "service science" as inspired by my reading of Decision Support Systems: An Organizational Perspective, by Peter G. W. Keen and Michael S. Scott Morton. This time I would like to begin with a question posed to me last October by a friend working at Accenture: He wanted to know what Accenture could do to make IT organizations better at what they do. My point of departure for answering this question involved an analogy from medical practice, viewing the IT organization as responsible for the "health" of the organization. I argued that IT developers needed to take a clinical approach to "taking the history of the patient," who comes in with some set of possibly pathological symptoms. I then extended the analogy by arguing that enterprises need "health maintenance," rather than "illness treatment." Ultimately, this conversation did not progress, possibly because the analogy was too much of a departure from the "normal practices" (as in "normal science") of both Accenture and its customers.

Imagine my surprise then in discovering that Keen and Scott Morton proposed a "clinical" approach to the development of decision support systems! What was particularly interesting was that they recognized two different levels of diagnosis that need to be performed by IT developers. The primary level of diagnosis relates to what I called "taking the history," identifying what needs to be changed and how IT can facilitate that change. However, they insisted that it is also important to diagnose symptoms of resistance to change, because, if the resistance is not "treated," it is not going to matter very much how effective the proposed solution is. The forces of resistance can undermine even the best of ideas, no matter how well they are implemented!

I then noticed in the Bibliography that Keen had been advocating this clinical stance since 1975, when he wrote a Sloan School Working Paper on the subject. That means that the idea has been around for over 30 years but has never really "taken" in the world of enterprise software. I suspect one reason for this is that this kind of thinking does not fit into the specializations found in most academic curricula. One does not go to business school (or, for that matter, computer science departments) to learn about "the socio-technology of diagnosis," let alone the intellectual skills required for such diagnosis, such as an understanding of the subjective (as well as objective) motives behind speech acts or the use of narrative as a tool for "thinking in time." As a result, Keen's insights seem to have faded into obscurity.

Meanwhile, the history of attempts to make IT useful to the enterprise continues to repeat itself. As Marx said, what is tragedy the first time around becomes farce with the next iteration. However, he did not say anything about any subsequent repetitions!

December 23, 2006: What Business Schools SHOULD Teach about Service Science

During this week's escape to Death Valley (where even a dial-up connection to the Internet is not very reliable), I took along my used copy of Decision Support Systems: An Organizational Perspective, by Peter G. W. Keen and Michael S. Scott Morton. The more I looked into this "time capsule" from the mid-seventies, the more I realized that the service science evangelists were doing themselves a great disservice by ignoring it. The authors even go so far as to say that decision support technology should not be viewed as a product that a technical team installs and then goes on to the next client. Instead, the team has a service obligation to the client to familiarize the client with the technology, bring the client up to speed on how that technology may best be used, and even update the technology to accommodate newly discovered client needs. Could it be that we knew more about service 30 years ago than we do today (and may I be contentious enough to suggest that we owe our "acquired ignorance" to the social beings we have become by virtue [sic] of the Internet)?

One passage in the final chapter of this book has stuck with me with regard to all the quibbling over creating an "academic discipline of service science." It is in a paragraph in which the authors discuss how those managers who are most likely to benefit from decision support technology should learn about that technology:

The best education for them is the building of a relationship with an effective DSS developer and, most importantly--the insistence on being committed and involved in the design an implementation process. A skilled manager who has flexibility of mind can and almost certainly should play a major role in the design of any DSS that she or he sponsors.

In other words what counts most on the managerial side is that "flexibility of mind" that will support a rich and profitable engagement with the developers trying to bring a new technology into play. This is as true today as it was thirty years ago. You would think we would know this by now; but, as the cliche keeps saying, "The Internet changes everything." Perhaps that crack about "acquired ignorance" has more to it than fiesty contentiousness!

December 14, 2006: An Economist for the Age of the Service Economy

As we continue to debate the question of whether or not service is a "science" and what sort of academic curriculum (if any) provides the necessary foundations for study we would do well to check out the resume of Deirdre McCloskey in Alan Ryan's New York Review article about her recent epic volume, The Bourgeois Virtues. McCloskey is, in Ryan's words, "a professional economist, trained in the Chicago School;" and, back when she was Donald McCloskey, he was one of the key economic advisers to the Reagan administration. (The "pronoun shift" was documented in her book Crossings, briefly cited by Ryan and excellently reviewed by Maxine Kumin in the November 14, 1999 New York Times Book Review.) With both Ronald Reagan and a sex-change operation behind her, McCloskey is now a distinguished professor of economics at both Erasmus University in Rotterdam and the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is also a professor of rhetoric and English and has published knowledgeably in the areas of history of ideas, social theory, and philosophy. Given that both the theory and the practice of economics now has to contend with the rise of the service economy (not to mention globalization), I can think of no better combination of academic disciplines to meet this challenge!

November 27, 2006: Why Call it "Science?"

Over a quiet Thanksgiving meal I had the chance to vent some of my discontent with the terminology of "service science" with a friend who teaches philosophy at San Jose State. With his background in philosophy, he asked a fundamental question that I realized I had ignored: Why do its proponents insist on calling it a "science?" Giving the matter some thought, I realized that this was probably a reflection of an obsession with science that went back (at least) as far as Frederick Winslow Taylor's effort to approach management "scientifically." Taylor's intense quantitative analysis of manufacturing processes cast a dark shadow over the nature of work for most of the twentieth century, but we never seem to be able to get out from under that shadow. What was comedy in Cheaper by the Dozen has become dark farce as die-hard Taylorists reflect the behavior of the small boy with a hammer to whom everything looks like a nail. Since Taylorism already exacted a devastating blow on the management of public education, there should be no surprise that there are those who now wish to apply its "scientific" approach to a broader range of services. Unfortunately, this is a nightmare from which we are unlikely to awaken as long as we remain under the spell of what Isaiah Berlin has called the "three unquestioned dogmas" of Western civilization. Taylorism is as much a faith as any other religious fundamentalism and can impose just as much distortion upon our view of the "real world."

October 11, 2006: Without a Cluetrain

Perhaps the greatest virtue of postmodernism is that it has taught us how to combat an overly-used slogan by inverting it. Consider the Cluetrain Manifesto. It is as easy to chant "markets are conversations" as it was for Orwell's sheep to chant, "Four legs good; two legs baaad!" This is not to devalue the insight beyond all recognition. As the Wikipedia entry points out, this really boils down to a healthy historical appreciation of the marketplace. Unfortunately, cheerleading based on slogans has little time for history; which is why the cheerleads occasionally need a healthy postmodern kick in the rear.

So, consider this, conversations are markets! The lesson of history is that conversation used to be an integral part of the delivery of goods and services. While it is all very well and good to talk about the power of the Internet to enable conversations, what has actually happened is that IT has disabled conversation from the domain of customer engagement, leaving nothing behind but the linguistic deception of "customer relationship management!" Now, in fairness to the Cluetrain founders, the verb form of "engagement" does rear its head in Thesis 45. This is an appropriate and powerful Thesis, even if many of us recognize it as an "insight into the obvious." Unfortunately, in the age of the short attention span, one can only wonder how many of the cheerleaders ever get as far as Thesis 45!

The real point however is that we have become so starved for conversation that we are willing to pay more for it. We still have old-fashioned instincts that prefer dealing with a salesperson who "knows the stuff;" and that knowledge emerges from our conversations. The same goes for dealing with a service representative who can do more than read from a script. In other words the power of the Internet to enable conversations really does not signify unless we can have the conversations we need when we need them, and there is no doubt that one can build a market around satisfying that need.

September 02, 2006: Thinking about Subject and Objects in a CRM Society

Two themes seem to be merging together into a common perspective. The more vivid is the impact that When the Levees Broke is having, the more I watch of it. The other is the impact that CRM technology seems to be having on our view of the world, which, in the past, I have considered primarily from the point of view of service. However, what I now have to say applies to all aspects of "customer relationships" purported to be covered by CRM technology. More recently I have also been exploring this theme in my comments on the Confused of Calcutta blog.

Let us begin with one fundamental premise: The name "Customer Relationship Management" is nothing more than (to try to use polite language) a linguistic deception. Anyone who thinks that this technology "manages customer relationships" probably has a thoroughly impoverished view of management, an absolutely distorted conception of the nature of relationships, and nothing less that total ignorance of who the customers are. It is that last point that inspired the title of this entry, because, at the end of the day, all CRM technology is based on the assumption that customers are viewed as objects, rather than subjects who, for one reason or another, have been motivated to engage with the vendor.

Then, while watching When the Levees Broke, it hit me: This is an assumption that has extended beyond the scope of CRM! Listening to a victim's account of the evacuation of the Superdome, the description came to a head when she finally blurted out that the evacuees were being treated like slaves. (Spike Lee may be the only film-maker not afraid to take such racially charged material and put it on the screen rather than bury it in a wastebasket.) To defuse the racial connotations, what she was saying was that the evacuees were being treated as objects. This may have been a matter of expediency or efficiency, but the people managing the evacuation made a calculated decision to deny subjectivity to each evacuee. Where this women invoked the image of the old slave markets, my wife invoked the image of Auschwitz, the other classic example of "mangement by objectification."

Were the victims of Katrina being treated as objects by people hooked on CRM technology? Probably not, but those folks did have the same worldview one finds among CRM promoters and users. Will vendors ever get back to those "good old days" when customer engagement was important? I shall not venture a guess, but I will confess to a strong streak of pessimism!

August 29, 2006 (2): Back in the Box?

Taking a whack at Web 2.0 has led me to wonder whether there is still any buzz over Web Services. When the book Out of the Box was published, I was working for a boss who wanted to see our laboratory go after the brass ring of Web Services in a big way; and I ended up being the annoying voice that kept saying, "Yes, but ... ." I just went to the Amazon site for this book and found that the last review was written in September of 2003. For me the operative sentence from that review was:

A highly readable work, just about the book's only weakness is that it is indeed based largely on conjecture, and the premise that today's web service protocols will form the foundation of long-term IT development.

I found myself thinking about this book last week when I was reading a 1983 paper from the American Sociological Review by Paul J. DiMaggio and Walter W. Powell, entitled "The Iron Cage Revisited: Institutional Isomorphism and Collective Rationality in Organizational Fields." What fascinated me about this paper is the argument it provided that, in any given field, such as health care, education, or even politics, the organizations that populate the field tends towards resembling each other rather than towards diversity. Thus, they manifest the phenomenon of the replication of social systems that lies at the heart of Anthony Giddens' structuration theory.

The more I read, the more I realized that, while Hagel had envisioned a world that could thrive on the diversity of software services that could be installed on the Web, the necessary infrastructure required just that kind of homogeneity that DiMaggio and Powell had studied. It is all very well and good to have representation for a Web Services Description Language (WSDL) or a mechanism for Universal Description, Discovery, and Integration (UDDI), but these representations can only link together different users of those users share some conventions on how those representations are structured. In other words the kinds of connection scenarios that Hagel presented can only work in a context of homogeneity among the beneficiaries in those scenarios. This then led me to ask whether or not, viewed as a population, Web sites are becoming more homogeneous or more diverse? I think we are still in a period of great diversity (which would not be good for Web Services); but it is not out of the question that the processes DiMaggio and Powell claim lead to homogenization, coercive, mimetic, and normative, will not eventually kick into action on the Web. Watch this space for further developments!

August 23, 2006: Service Science as an Academic Discipline (according to IBM)

A former colleague was kind enough to point me at the Web page for a Symposium on "Services Sciences, Management and Engineering" hosted by the IBM Tokyo Research Laboratory on September 8, 2005. He also pointed out that, if one followed the link to the Japanese content, one could find a PDF version of the presentation given by James Spohrer from IBM Almaden Services Research. My colleague had not know that I had "vented" about my experience at Almaden in March of 2004 in the June 25 entry for this blog. Obviously, I was very curious to see if the story had improved at all since my last encounter with the IBM point of view. Having now reviewed the material, my personal opinion is that there is a lot more content but not a lot of improvement. Obviously, I want to elaborate on this!

Apparently, the first step in declaring a "Service Science" is to come up with a definition for it. This is the first one that was presented to the Symposium audience:

The application of scientific, management, and engineering disciplines to tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another (‘services’)

I have to say that I think that describing "services" as "tasks that one organization beneficially performs for and with another" is not a bad idea. I just wish that Spohrer had taken it more seriously. The rest of the slides had a very prescriptive tone, but there seemed to be a tacit assumption that benefit would arises as a side-effect of all the recommendations being prescribed. I think this is not just silly but dangerous. My own experience has led me to the conviction that any enterprise that is serious about being a service provider must assign top priority to looking for new opportunities to provide benefits to the customer. Once you get beyond theory into the realities of practice, this priority trumps the "coproduction of value," a buzz phrase that sounded great the first time I saw it in the Harvard Business Review but has begun to grate on my nerves the more I hear it. Value is the side-effect of understanding where the benefits are, not the other way around.

So how do you understand where the benefits are? The first step is to cultivate the art of customer engagement. However, as I have already observed, our techno-centric fixations with such "solutions" as CRM have done little more than warp our ability to master this art. Thinking in terms of science, management, or engineering seems to have done little more than reduce the customer to an object with requirements to be satisfied. This is the heart of the warped thinking that results: The customer must be engaged as a subject; and, as one understands customer-as-subject, one will understand where the opportunities for benefit are. Understanding is the operative action here (and it should be treated as an action, rather than a result of analysis). This is why my entry about service on June 17 was such a desperate attempt to invoke the lessons that Habermas had to teach about a theoretical foundation for the actions that lead to achieving understanding. Furthermore, the progression from engagement to opportunities for benefit is essential a problem of interpretation. Customer engagement provides the opportunity to "interpret the customer;" but it is also necessary to "interpret the world" that constitutes the customer's context. Now, when Spohrer's presentation finally gets around to proposing a curriculum, the unhappy truth about what is on his slide is that, while all of the subject areas have to do with decision making, none of them have to do with interpreting that "world" in which the decisions have to be made! To use the language I have appropriated from Kenneth Burke, to think of decision making as a strictly scientific problem and to ignore the role that dramatistic thinking and acting plays is dangerous. It is like the blind man who thinks that feeling an elephant's leg is enough to understand the whole elephant.

At this point I should observe that one theme that plays a very heavy role in Spohrer's slides involves the word "innovation." Perhaps this obsession gets at why a research laboratory with its roots in physics and computer science (the way in which the slides introduce IBM Research) will never understand what makes service "work." Yes, innovation is a term in the equation, so to speak; but it is an auxiliary term. A service provider arrives at innovation by focusing on how to get customer engagement and benefit discovery right; and what could be more innovative than identifying an opportunity for benefit that the competition has either ignored or overlooked?

If we do want to talk about where innovation enters the picture, a good place to begin is probably a book by Alain Dumont entitled, Innover dans les service (published, alas, only in French). This is a book of case studies, so there is not much prescription here. On the other hand Dumont at least came up with an inspiring subtitle: De l'évident à l'impensable. In this language one might say that customer engagement begins by "interpreting the evident" and arrives at opportunities for benefit by following the interpretation through to the "unthinkable" (or at least the not-previously-thought). Now, since this book was published in 2001, there probably are no case studies that would still seem "unthinkable;" and, for any of these case studies, it will not be easy to reconstruct the mind-set of what was "evident" at the beginning of the story. Nevertheless, I think Dumont is on to something.

At the end of the day, any business that decides it want to make the shift from providing products to providing services is going to have to recognize that a cultural shift is prerequisite. The real problem with the IBM slides is that they offer an alternative to making that cultural shift, but it is a false alternative. You know how bad things are when you look at that list of 28 disciplines that get "mapped" on slide 8 (pictured above). Note that Education is at the very bottom of the list, yet that is probably the oldest (or second-oldest) service profession in history! I suppose I would even be so arrogant as to proclaim that anyone who does not acknowledge education as the most important service offering in history does not have the foggiest idea of what service really is!

July 22, 2006: The Classroom of the Future

Things have been quiet here because this past week I had the opportunity to sit in on a workshop being conducted for the benefit of about half a dozen principals from the California public education system. The purpose of the workshop was basically to let them know what was out there on the "bleeding edge" of new technologies, particularly information technologies, as a way of getting them to offer their own visions of the classroom of the future. Listening to their presentations on the final day, I was struck by a distinction that I first raised in discussing the opposition of lexis and praxis: While most technical presentations I attend are heavily noun-based (usually concentrating on features and their attributes), the grammatical foundations of all the presentations the principals gave were heavily (and refreshingly) rooted in verbs. Given my preoccupation with this need to give "equal time" to both nouns and verbs, I was very glad to see that attention reflected in the way in which these representatives of the educational community expressed themselves.

However, following the presentations, the discussion took a twist that was also very interesting. Whenever the conversation turns to any form of change management in an educational system, whether or not it involves new technology, the question that always arises involves what it will take to make the change happen in a setting that is painfully strapped for resources and always seems to be the victim of prevailing political trends. One suggestion that was raised was that we could not count on change management coming from the government; so it would have to come from the commercial sector, which, after all had the most to gain (or lose) from the quality (or lack thereof) of public education. At this point I realized that one of the principals had invoked the language of scientific management on one of his slides, although, to his benefit, he realized that one had to think beyond questions of "productivity" to questions of "customer satisfaction." Nevertheless, it made me think about the cultural context in which we think of the stakeholders in our educational system as "customers."

This then reminded me of a book that I read with great relish at the beginning of this year: Education and the Cult of Efficiency: A Study of the Social Forces that have Shaped the Administration of Public Schools, by Raymond E. Callahan. Never mind that this book was published in 1962; the extent that it was still relevant today was, to say the least, chilling. In a nutshell this book provided an excellent review of the principles of "scientific management," which basically originated from the work of Charles Taylor, and then discussed the ways in which public school systems tried to embrace those principles to the general detriment of the quality of education. Callahan recognized that the overall goal of scientific management is efficiency of production and that this goal is, at the very least, at cross-purposes (if not fundamentally opposed) to goals of education, which, to invoke terminology I raised on June 13, have more to do with effectiveness than efficiency. Then I realized that, for all the lip service that has been paid to getting beyond the narrow view of scientific management in the enterprise, whether it involves "total quality," "knowledge management," or rhetoric about "customer relationships," most enterprises are still locked into that goal of efficiency of production, even if, in the Brave New World of services and globalization, they do not always have a clear idea of what it is they actually produce! Consequently, it may be a vain hope to expect that change in the educational establishment will come from a private sector that may be willing to talk about the value of effectiveness "in theory" but, when it comes to practice, it still locked into thinking about efficiency of production.

June 25, 2006: Service is a Science, or is it?

Thinking back on yesterday's comments about nostalgia, I have decided that not all of the agonies of Hell involve happy memories. One can also be tortured by unpleasant memories, particularly when you feel you could have taken some action (or just said something) to change them. (You might call these the agonies of "coulda-shoulda-woulda.") I had one of those hauntings this morning, so now I have to get it off my chest.

This is a memory from March 24, 2004 and the Almaden Institute I attended that day. The topic was "Work in the era of the global, extensible enterprise;" but the focus was on work in the service sector. The tone was set by the welcoming remarks, which, as I recall, were delivered by Paul Horn, Senior Vice President of IBM Research. The main thing I remember from those remarks can be roughly paraphrased (if not directly quoted) as follows:

Fifty years ago IBM partnered with Columbia University to invent the academic discipline of computer science; today I am announcing that we are partnering with the University of California at Berkeley to invent the discipline of service science.

This was my first unpleasant experience of the day. I had always felt (courtesy of one of the many citations dug up by Knuth) that the foundations of computer science were laid in a series of lectures in the summer of 1946 at the University of Pennsylvania, after their pioneering work in digital computing (the Eniac) for the military during the Second World War. I have to confess to a strong personal bias behind this belief, since the first lecture was delivered on July 8, 1946, which happens to be the day I was born! However, I also remember Edsger Dijkstra's Turing Award speech, in which he talked about those people who can only understand concepts when delivered in their own terminology. The examples he gave were Catholics and Communists; but, when history is involved, I have discovered there are plenty of other examples!

The real memory-agony, however, dealt with the whole idea of their being a science of service, particularly since one of my activities that day involved a break-out session to discuss the curriculum for that new academic discipline. To this day I believe that our session went absolutely nowhere, because we could not think of any area of study that could be excluded from the curriculum; and so it is that I am haunted. Fortunately, I think Hegel has been helping me see some light. My entry about putting philosophy in its place can actually be boiled down to deciding whether the objective of the study of philosophy is descriptive or prescriptive. Hegel came down strongly on the former option, arguing that those descriptions should be as clear as possible, since they depicted "reality as it is." As a result I would extend Hegel and argue that, just as philosophy is a descriptive discipline, science is a prescriptive one, concerned primarily with understanding enough about the natural world to exercise control over it. So, in the tradition of answering one question with another question, before asking if there is a science of service, we might consider the extent to which the study of service can lead to prescriptive results.

Here I would like to cite some of the work of Orion White, a sociologist who was studying service organizations before their operations had been influenced by digital technology. He drew the distinction that a service organization is dialectical, rather than bureaucratic (Public Administration Review, 1969). In more contemporary language we could say that the operations of a service organization cannot be reduced to business processes, which may then be "engineered" for optimal efficiency. Instead, operations are all about recognizing underlying oppositions and resolving them synthetically, rather than coming down on one side or the other as "the way it has to be." I would then argue that, while it may be possible for a bureaucratic organization, one cannot take a prescriptive approach to the operations of a dialectical organization. One can only build up a repertoire of keen descriptive skills, through which one can grasp the reality of the entire situation, and then, with a Habermas-like ambition, apply that grasp to achieving an understanding that is social and subjective, rather than strictly objective. Since science only "plays" in the objective world, the very concept of a service science entails an impoverished view of the world.

What, then, is the primary descriptive goal in the study of service? I would argue that it involves the nature of value and how value is perceived by individuals in their social settings. In this respect one could do worse than begin with the study of the production of value that Marx began to develop at great length in his Grundrisse (even if much of that work went through a major overhaul by the time he was writing Capital). Marx was well aware that the production of value was not strictly a matter of the commodities that enter a production process in one form and leave in another. Much of Marx' attention focused on the consequences of viewing labor, itself, as a commodity; but Habermas expanded his own scope beyond the basic operation and operators of the production line. He presented evidence "that we consider whether the work incorporated in rationalization must not be understood and evaluated as second-order productive labor—as an independent one, because it depends on productive labor of the first order." (In many ways this is Habermas' first recognition of the role that understanding plays in work practices.) Thus, any understanding of the nature of value has to account for the ways in which knowledge contributes to value (an issue that was given lip service during the heady days of the "knowledge movement" but never subjected to the standards of descriptive discipline that Hegel had set for philosophy).

So am I just playing out a pun that the study of service should be grounded in the Grundrisse? Am I trying to send a be-careful-what-you-wish-for message to IBM, because the path to that wish may lead through Marx? No, I am just content to play Hegel's game and do my part towards the depiction of "reality as it is," however, complex that reality may be!

June 17, 2006: Someone Should Come up to Speed on Habermas 101!

Today's E-Commerce Times ran an interview that Louise Lee, of Business Week Online, held with Richard Hunter, whom Dell has appointed to fix their problems with how they are handling customer service. Hunter's background is in manufacturing; so, in the words of his interview, he views customer service as "a giant process." As a matter of fact, it is interesting to see how he elaborates on this: "The input is calls, e-mails, and questions on the chat board. There are tens of thousands of people in the center following a process. The output is satisfied customers. That's the theory." So it should not come as any surprise that none of the variants of the word "communicate" ever appear in this interview (nor, for that matter is there any allusion to the concept of "engagement")! Needless to say, I was very disconcerted by this interview and have submitted a Talkback comment. As of this writing it has not yet passed into the system, but it will probably be worth checking the link to the interview to see if it surfaces!

Addendum: The Talkback comment surfaced on June 19!

June 14, 2006: CRM and the End of Civil Society as we Know it?

Yesterday, E-Commerce Times ran a story from the Sacramento Bee by Anita Creamer about the "user-hostile" customer service she received in conjunction with an airline reservation she had made. I decided to provide a talkback comment that built on yesterday's theme of the loss of effectiveness in the name of efficiency. My bottom line was that a call center based on CRM software may be more to blame than the airline industry, since that software is really not designed to support engagement with the customer. Nevertheless, the software may be a symptom of the general decline of civil discourse in society today, not just in the workplace but also in leisure activities.