Some years ago, an old lady with more than hundred years of life experience im America was asked which technology changed her life the most. She didn’t hesitate to answer: running water. The ability to open the tap and have instant access to fresh water was the single most important technology in her life, even before electricity and all the household appliances it enables. Without running water, every household is forced to employ or pay a worker that does nothing else but to carry water from the source to the sink.
In today’s physical world, with physical goods, there is still a profession that relies on a specific aspect of physical objects: They won’t move from A to B without a carrier. The whole field of logistics and transportation would be obsolete in the instant that physical goods learn to move themselves. The water carrier lives on, in the form of a cardboard or palette carrier.
The three basic goods of IT are software, data and information. They all share a common trait: They can move without a human carrier. In the old days before the internet, software was distributed on physical objects like floppy disks (think of oddly shaped usb sticks) or CDs later. With the ubiquitous access to running data (often called the internet and mobile computing), we can draw our software straight from the tap. (And yes, I like the metaphor of the modem as an “information tap”). As the data throughput of our internet connections grew, it became feasible to move large amounts of data into “the cloud”. The paper boy that brings the newspaper early every morning is replaced by a virtual newspaper that updates every few seconds. The profession of a data carrier didn’t exist outside of very delicate data movements. And even them got replaced by strong cryptography.
Even information and knowledge, a classic carrier-bound good, is slowly replaced by books and pre-recorded online courses. The “wise man” (or woman) still exists, but his range was extended from his immediate geographical surrounding and his arbirtrary placement on the timeline to the whole world and all times after his publication. We don’t need to be physically present to attend a course anymore and we don’t need to synchronize our schedule with the lecturer. Knowledge and information is free to roam the planet.
With all this said and known, why are there still jobs and activities that resemble nothing more than the water carrier of our information age? Let me reiterate once more what a water carrier does: He takes something from position A and moves it to position B. In the ideal case, everything he picked up at A is delivered at B, in full and unchanged. We don’t want the carrier to lose part of the water underway and we surely don’t want him to tamper with our water.
As soon as you add something valueable to the payload (you augment it) while you carry it from A to B, you aren’t a water carrier anymore, you can be described in terms of your augmentation. But what if you add nothing? If you deliver the payload in the same condition as you picked it up? Then you are a water carrier. You don’t have a justification for your work in IT. Or you have one that I can’t see right now, then I’m eager to hear from you! Please leave a comment.
There is a classic movie that describes life and work in IT perfectly: Office Space. If you haven’t seen it yet, please put it on your watch list. I’m sure you can even draw it from your information tap. In the movie, a company with a generic IT name needs to “consolidate their staff” (as in lose some slackers). They hire some consultants that interview the whole crew. Each interview is hilarious in itself, but one is funny, tragic and suitable for our topic at hand, the water carrier:
The problem with Tom Smykowski (the guy trying to defend his job) is, that he’s probably better with people than most developers, but he still cannot sell his augmentations to the two consultants. They try to tie him down to a physical good that must be carried, but even Tom has to admit that somebody else covers the physical level. So he tries to sell his “good influence” on the process as the augmentation, but the consultants are too ignorant to recognize it. Needless to say, Tom loses his job.
Every time you just relay information without transforming it (like appending additional information or condensing it to its essence), you just carry water. Improve your environment by bypassing yourself. If you take yourself out of the communication queue, you will save time and effort and nobody has a disadvantage. You should only be part of a communication or work queue if you can augment the thing being passed through the queue. If you can’t specify your augmentation, perhaps somebody else behind you in the queue can give you hints about it. I would argue that being able to pinpoint one’s contribution to the result is the most important part of every workplace description. If you know your contribution, you can improve it. Otherwise, you may be carrying water without even knowing it.
Eliminate the middlemen in your work queues to improve efficiency. But be sure to keep anybody who contributes to the result. So, eliminate the water carriers.
Schneide Blog 