Technology Futures

The U.S. Dept. of Labor has announced they are going to revise the way they count jobs. In the past, the emphasis was on the Payroll Survey. In this survey, employers are called and asked how many employees they have. Payroll jobs have been shrinking, hence a lot of political heat and smoke about whether the economy is improving or not. But Labor has also been doing what's called the Household Survey, in which households are polled about who is working in the household. Job counts based on the Household Survey have been increasing rather dramatically, but the government has not really factored those jobs into the "jobs" number that typically gets published and discussed widely.

If you have a self-employed husband and wife, both fully "employed" in their own businesses, those jobs never show up on the Payroll Survey. They would on the Household Survey.

This is an important issue for communities trying to measure the impact of new and diversified economic development efforts, like investments in getting affordable broadband and small business training and development. If economic developers are being rewarded for increases in payroll jobs, the community is losing out big time--that's not where the growth is.

Not only that, a factory floor payroll job is not necessarily equal to a self-employed job. A prosperous microenterprise owner with a gross business income of $150,000/year and take home "pay" of half that has a much larger impact on the economic health of the community than a $12/hour full time hourly worker, and it's probably much more than just a simple 3x factor. One economic developer I talked to thought that the impact of a single self-employed professional in the community might be worth as much as ten shop floor jobs, because of the indirect effect. Self-employed professionals are spending some of their business income on local businesses--attorneys, accountants, copy services, and other professionals in the community, lifting all of them.

How is your community counting jobs? How are you rewarding your economic developers? Are you rewarding them for the right things?

It's hard to feel very sorry for USAir and the company's financial problems. Yesterday, I saw yet another example of IT stupidity. I got to Charlotte and wanted to catch an earlier flight. The Roanoke flight that was leaving was nearly full, so I had to stand and watch the poor gate agent laboriously hand key every boarding pass into the computer. Fifty boarding passes, each one requiring several keystrokes. And virtually every boarding pass had a bar code on it.

Now Delta has very expensive, custom made scanners that must easily cost $20-30K each (note that Delta is also bankrupt). Southwest, which is making money, has cheap, off the shelf barcode scanners (cost about $50) duct-taped to the side of their cheap off the shelf PC computers. So bankrupt USAir manages their seats by hand, bankrupt Delta buys hideously expensive custom terminals, and profitable Southwest makes good use of off the shelf technology. Get the picture?

But wait, there's more, as they say in the knife infomercials. The USAir agent finally established that there was a seat on the plane for me. By this time, the plane was about to leave. He looks at my ticket and informs me that there will be a $25 charge to change the ticket, and that I have to go to the Special Services desk in the main terminal to take care of it. He then apologizes there is not time to do that, and the plane takes off.

Before leaving, I observe the special, custom keyboard he is using has a card reader on it, but USAir's crack IT department apparently never bothered to give the agent software that would allow him to take customer money.

So we have a bankrupt airline that is not equipped to take money from their customers. Hmmm. Anyone see anything wrong with this picture?

Earthlink faces the same problem AOL is already struggling with--a shrinking market for dial access to the Internet. Earthlink has been staying in the black by slashing customer support and by providing barebones access, as opposed to AOL's tedious, ad-laden interface.

Earthlink has a lot of customers like me, who need occasional dial access from the road, and don't want the dreck AOL ladles out along with it. But I find I need to dial through Earthlink less and less as hotspots, especially in hotels, become more common. As I've written previously, I and many other travelers now pick hotels based on the availability of broadband, not on the kind of shampoo you find in the bathroom.

AOL has tried to keep its customers by extortion--for example, you can't forward your AOL email to another account, which makes it much more difficult to quit AOL if you have used your AOL email address for a long time. AOL is basically saying to customers, "Leave us and your life will be miserable while all your email goes missing for a while." Most other email account providers let you forward your mail.

But back to Earthlink, which is now providing limited VoIP services if you have an Earthlink broadband account. It's a clever move, because the appeal of free calling (at least to some of your friends and family) will help sell the access part.

We're going to see more bundling of services--the phone companies are trying to win back some broadband customers by bundling local, long distance, and broadband, and the appeal, aside from saving a little money, is that you potentially go to one bill from three. In theory, you should also be able to get better service and customer support (in theory).

CNet has a must read article on the digital divide. The divide the online news site discusses is the one between "digital natives" and "digital immigrants."

Digital natives are those 25 and younger, who have grown up immersed in the Internet, computers, and technology. Digital immigrants are the older group, especially 40 and above, who have had to "cross over" to the new digital world from the old, paper-based world.

As organizations retire more of the immigrants and are replacing them with more natives, the organizations are being changed. The old central command and central authority structures are being undermined and replaced by distributed command and control. Technology and the Internet are the catalysts for often informal lines of communication and collaboration that cut across top-down org charts and limit the ability of managers to "control" the work.

The challenge for communities is to help leaders recognize that this shift is taking place--that the old, authoritarian ways of making decisions in the community don't work anymore--the Internet lets citizens and businesspeople route around the old, top down procedures. If your community is worried that too many young people are leaving, could it be in part because they view community-decisionmaking as out of step with their needs and interests? Conversely, what is the community losing in jobs and opportunities because of outmoded control structures that are not able to lead the community successfully in the fast-paced, highly interlinked Knowledge Economy?