My career started just before the digital revolution. I started in an infantry battalion (2PPCLI) in 1978 as a platoon commander, and then the assistant adjutant. That second role showed me how offices work, and I’ve always compared every office I’ve worked in afterwards to that experience.
Today, information flows much faster. That’s a good thing. It’s not all good, though.
CC everybody. Back in the day, the number of people you could cc on correspondence was limited to the number of carbon copies (that, of course, is the origin of ‘cc’) that the typewriter could make, so it might have been two or three. Now, we can add as many additional readers as we want, even though we don’t need them to do anything. We just want to keep them informed, which means that everyone’s inbox fills up with stuff that might not be that important to them, time is wasted, and people don’t read emails that sometimes they probably should.
Where did they go? Because we communicate almost exclusively by email, we direct our correspondence to individuals, and not to their positions, even though that is often what we really want. Back in the day, a letter to the A/Adjt of 2PPCLI went to whoever happened to be in the job. Now, if you sent an email to someone who just left that job, it would not go to their successor. You’d probably find out quickly enough because it would bounce back, but unless you knew who the new A/Adjt of 2PPCLI was, you’re hooped, and valuable time is lost. Now, communications with organizations can be severed when someone moves on, and you lose your link to the position, not just the person.
Our institutional memory just got hit by a bus. Our institutional memory is in people, not servers. We tend to save everything, but it’s hard to find because information in computers is invisible until it’s on the screen in front of you. Before computers, if a letter came in to me on, let’s say, a NATO exercise in Norway, it would first go to the Central Registry (CR), where it would be opened and assigned a file number. It would then come to me, and I would do something with the information, and send the letter back to the CR. If anyone else wanted to know what was going on with the NATO exercise in Norway, they would ask the CR for that file, and they’d get the letter and everything else we had on that subject, even if it was years later. Today, when someone leaves, a lot of institutional knowledge goes with them, and because there is no central filing system, no one else can pick up where they left off. (I recently had a client ask me to do work for them that I had actually done three years ago. The only change in the office was the person asking for the work. I sent them the reports I wrote for them in 2021, and I haven’t heard anything since.)
Which document is the one I need to read? Have you ever done a Google Search on your own organization’s data? I have, and it’s a mess. It doesn’t forget anything, returns way too many hits, and if you’re not careful you will get an obsolete version of a report and not the one you need. It can be difficult to sort the signal from the noise.
2i/c, take over. Back in the day, when the Commanding Officer of 2PPCLI went on a trip, he would leave the Deputy Commanding Officer in charge. The CO was away, out of easy communications, and so the DCO would make the decisions until the boss returned. Now, everyone has smartphones and laptops, so office work follows us like a bad smell. How will we ever train our replacements if we don’t give them real experience in the role? And what’s the point of travelling when you end up sitting at a conference table trying to put out fires back at the office?
Nothing impairs communications as quickly as smartphones and laptops. They are too distracting, and should be banned from conferences. We work hard to get together to exchange ideas and information, and then the wifi password is put up on the screen and everyone is pulled back into the electronic gravity hole. I once attended a conference along with about 120 other people, and during one of the presentations, I counted six people who were paying attention. Everyone else was looking at their laptops. The guy beside me was watching Netflix. His company spent a lot of money to fly him to Atlanta to watch TV.
How did that leak happen? Classification of information is a real problem. We handle access to information through a permission structure. Back in the day we did the same thing, but everything was on paper, and classified information had warnings on every page and often on every paragraph. Now, we give permission to someone to access a SharePoint (or similar) site, and if they don’t have permission, they don’t get in. Fine. The problem comes when a document from a restricted access site is printed: it has now been disconnected from the classification structure, and is easily compromised. I have found documents forgotten on office printers that were extremely sensitive, but there were no classification or handling instructions on them.
These are some of the costs that the digital revolution has imposed on us. I hope that AI can help us in some of these, but I’m not holding my breath.