"The technology is great, will really address my problem, but it costs too much." "If it only cost half as much I would get it today."
I don't know about you, but I still get hit by these familiar laments from one side of the cost conundrum. I have an acquaintance who told me in 1987 that he would purchase that year's PC model if it only had a little more RAM, came with a hard disk standard, and was just a little faster.
The other side is, of course, that next year this technology will only cost half as much. And, if not next year, then certainly the year after that the cost will have halved. And, if it's technology improvements you want, next year's model at the same price will be about 50 percent faster with about 50 percent more secondary storage. Suffice it to say that my acquaintance still hasn't acquired his first computer. So why don't folks buy when the price/performance reaches their professed value point?
I can suggest some hypotheticals. A year or two later the next generation is on the market and it has "obsoleted" the previous. Besides, it costs as much as the previous generation did originally and you certainly wouldn't want to buy "old" technology, no matter what its cost, would you? Or, it is now clear that some major new hardware or software breakthrough is imminent (PowerPC or Windows 95 or some such) and we should wait for the marketplace to absorb this major change. Or, ceteris paribus, if we buy now it will just be obsolete in a couple of years and we will have to upgrade to the latest technology.
However, these hypotheticals don't get at the underlying issues as we can find plenty of examples of folks who make heavy use of computing and communications networks in one aspect of their lives while seeming to ignore them in others. Nowhere is this more evident than in those information age recalcitrants-health care and education.
I was checking into a hospital out-patient facility the other day for some X-rays (the second time in two weeks) when I was struck by the anachronism of the same clerk asking the same set of questions-the answers to which were dutifully entered into her computer terminal. I mentioned that we had been through this just 11 days prior and she might just want to call up my previous record as nothing had changed. She seemed startled. She observed that she had no way to call up "old" records. When she asked again for my health care card I asked her what percentage of the patients used the same health care provider as mine. "Oh, about 90 percent," she said. I added to her aggravation by asking her why the hospital didn't have the health care provider use "smart cards" so that with one swipe of the card through a reader she could collect nearly all the information she was so laboriously drawing out of me via a verbal dialogue. Now she was totally mystified. "Why would we want to do that?" I restrained myself from the obvious answer-that it might help to reduce health care costs and, not incidentally, avoid the problem of the miskeyed entry from my previous visit that would no doubt take months (and lots of dollars in clerical salaries) to resolve.
One can observe the same anomalous behavior in higher education where great computational and networking effort is expended to enroll students in classes-frequently with very complex computational algorithms to give preference to graduating seniors, students in their major courses, or athletes with unusual scheduling requirements. At the same time, there are very few campuses where a faculty member can call up a class roster on her desktop computer. These "old" records simply aren't available outside the confines of the institutional MIS. Don't even ask about submitting course grades over the network.
And, how many faculty do we know who spend untold hours on their personal computer with their research work but who have never dreamed of applying the same technology to their teaching/learning venues? In these cases it isn't any deficiency in the technology but rather laments that the technology isn't uniformly available to students, or properly configured in the classroom, or . . . !
The real cost conundrum is that many applications of information technology require significant effort in rethinking and restructuring processes. The rewards generally flow to the "consumer" in the form of lower prices and/or higher product quality rather than to the service provider in the form of lower costs. When front line employees don't view the organization holistically-health care and education being two paramount examples-there is little incentive to change the processes through the introduction of information technology.
Robert C. Heterick, Jr., is president of Educom. [email protected]