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The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article asking if intranets are making professors stupid. The article starts out focusing on e-mail and quickly drills down to identify all the time-wasters that turn expensive faculty members from productive, professional thinkers to unproductive, amateur administrators.
A subtler factor arose as an unexpected side effect of the introduction of "productivity-enhancing" networked personal computers to professional life. As the economist Peter G. Sassone observed in the early 1990s, personal computers made administrative tasks just easy enough to eliminate the need for dedicated support staff — you could now type your own memos using a word processor or file expenses directly through an intranet portal. In the short term, these changes seemed to save money. But as Sassone documents, shifting administrative tasks to high-skilled employees led to a decrease in their productivity, which reduced revenue — creating losses that often surpassed the amount of money saved by cuts to support staff. He describes this effect as a diminishment of "intellectual specialization," and it's a dynamic that's not spared higher education, where professors spend an increasing amount of time dealing with the administrative substrate of their institutions through electronic interfaces.
We can actually quantify the background hum of busyness that Knuth so assiduously avoids. In 2014, the Boise State anthropologist John Ziker released the results of a faculty time-use study, which found that the average professor spent a little over 60 hours a week working, with 30 percent of that time dedicated to email and meetings. Anecdotal reports hint that this allocation has only gotten worse over the past five years.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Saturday April 20 2019, @10:19AM (5 children)
think, instead, of hosptials.
Doctors doing their own photocopying, writing up the minutes of meetings, or sitting in a meeting having the latest poliy change read to them.
Save 2 FTE in clerical staff but 40-80 hours a week of work, but that work still needs to be done, but now by staff costing four or five times as much, aren't seeing patients
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 4, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Saturday April 20 2019, @12:49PM (4 children)
There's been an experiment in which each doctor is paired with a scribe, who writes dictated notes, interfaces with the computer, and so forth. The doctor is thus free to actually talk to the patient and look at him while doing his work.
These scribes are, of course, trained for this specialty.
I don't have a citation, but I have been told that this procedure enhanced overall productivity.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @02:59PM (2 children)
I wonder how patient privacy & confidentiality laws work in that case, but assuming everything is legal, it seems like a pretty straightforward economic argument of increased productivity vs. cost of employment for technician. Automatic transcription/voice control advances might achieve the same result without requiring another employee too.
(Score: 2) by realDonaldTrump on Saturday April 20 2019, @08:39PM
You say something interesting. But you're Spelling isn't 100%. And the Down Modders jump all over it. Sad!
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Sunday April 21 2019, @05:55PM
This is not a troll at all. The AC points out some legitimate concerns with the point I made.
I'd appreciate if those that downmodded it as a troll would rescind their mods.
Privacy is a legitimate concern. The scribe will have to maintain the same confidentiality as the doctor.
However, automatic voice recognition is not likely to give the same advantages -- at least, not for ten years at least. It's the technician's familiarity with the computer systems that enables the doctor to attend to the patient instead of monitoring what he says on the computer screen. Even doctors who touch type will benefit from such a scribe.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 20 2019, @03:45PM
I've been taking an older relative to doc appointments for some years now.
One eye specialist has his assistant do all the keyboarding and the result is that the doctor is available to talk with the patient for the full visit--much better than the docs that are looking down at their screen through most of the visit. This assistant has (by now) learned most of the jargon and rarely needs to ask the doc for clarification.