Interesting piece on the corporate use of email, messaging apps and LLMs on the capsulated.life gemlog:
gemini://capsulated.life/posts/2026-09-24-human-eyes-dont-read-the-prose.gmi
I spent my whole working life with a large firm of accountants. The technology used for internal and external communications, for team working and the recording of knowledge and decision making, changed many times during that period. Sitting here reading that post, I wonder whether it would be possible to define and quantify the benefits of each of those changes, at least in broad terms.
On my first day at work in 1987 I was issued with a briefcase (used), a pad of accountant's analysis paper and a Dictaphone. My immediate colleagues were case managers in a legal team and about 8 or 10 of us shared a secretary/typist, Sheila. She had an IBM PC running DOS and a suitable version of Wordstar, but for short pieces of dictation she preferred her IBM electric golfball typewriter, which got her to the finished document more quickly.
Sheila more than kept up with all of our typing. Long reports, external letters, internal memos, file notes, corrections of first and subsequent drafts of any and all of those, she just did it. She was fast and accurate, and we didn't have to type, or know how to type, we just dictated into our tape machines. For anything really urgent you used the landline phone on your desk, then dictated a file note of the conversation for Sheila to type up. Alternatively we had a fax machine with a roll of heat-sensitive paper. There was great excitement when it was upgraded to a plain paper version.
Sheila had the only computer in the office until around 1990, then PCs running DOS with a text-based UI started appearing, with X.400 email. But almost no one had email, and the dictation + typing model continued. Changes started with Windows 3.1 and then Windows 95, along with Lotus Notes and Lotus Smartsuite (before Microsoft Office came along). Secretary/typists didn't start to get reassigned as PAs to senior managers until after 2000, and I was still using a Dictaphone until 2005 or beyond, at least some of the time.
The trouble with email is that you can cc anyone you want. People do that because they adopt what in spy fiction is called London Rules (i.e. cover your arse) and cc-ing everyone who you might need to show that you were doing your job (look at the timestamp, I'm still working at 11pm!) or that when something went wrong it wasn't your fault became normal very quickly. Eventually I was spending at least half my day dealing with email, most of which I didn't need to action and much of which I didn't really need to read. My tidy mind made me want to file everything and achieve 'Inbox Zero', which was usually a waste of time.
Of course we later got the conference call and then the video call and instant messaging and all the rest of it. The question is, did productivity improve, and if it did how would you demonstrate that it could be attributed to any particular technology? I'm not convinced that more work was done or that revenue or profit per fee-earning manager increased in real terms, or at least not significantly. After we moved from an exclusively paper-based workflow other costs proliferated: in 1987 the firm's IT department headcount was about 10, and 15 years later it was nearly 1,000 (until outsourcing to India came along). Millions were spent on hardware and software, and the constant churn of technologial change began. Add in the impact of giving thousands of staff access to the internet at their desks, then giving them all iPhones and providing that access everywhere, all the time, and I'm sure you would find that a lot of the day was and still is being spent on personal tasks and browsing, even though social media is blocked on the firm's devices.
I'm a dinosaur of course, retired now, and I never really was a big fan of technology in the workplace because it wasn't what made me a specialist, a subject matter expert. So perhaps I'm wrong and maybe profit per partner has increased dramatically in the last 40 years. But back then the most senior people drove Aston Martins, had a flat in London and a house in the country, and they still do. Actually, I seem to recall back then the most senior partner had a chauffeur, and that's not the case now. I speak to former colleagues who tell me their targets for chargeable time are higher than ever, that their every move is monitored, and in the latest ruse from the management they all have to provide evidence at each quarterly performance review of how they have used AI to add value for clients. I'm so glad that's all behind me.
Email: kdan01 [at] posteo [dot] net