New Technology and Management in a Non-Market Environment: A Case Study of Office Automation in Swedish Hospitals

Abstract

Office automation is a convenient label for those applications of ‘New Technology’ in which clerical activities are in some way automated, or their degree of automation increased. The common feature of the majority of instances of office automation is the ubiquitous VDU and keyboard, which convey a superficial similarity to the appearance of office automation, despite the widely varying contexts. In reality, the clerical processes experiencing change as a result of office automation vary enormously with respect to complexity, scale, range of functions, centrality to the organisation, connections to physical processes and so on. Clearly they merit individual examination, and we should expect substantial variations in associated changes in work organisation. Furthermore, there is an additional aspect of office automation which differentiates its significance from that of manufacturing automation. Systems which increase the degree of automation of routine information transactions also create data-bases from which more elaborate analyses of the performance of an organisation can be calculated. This is a potential management motivation for office automation. Thus it may change the scope, nature and pattern of availability of management control information within an organisation, and thereby have direct consequences for management practices, as well as for the people performing individual clerical tasks.