Still the exception

Despite such successes, though, the use of anthropologists within IT organizations is limited, says Ed Liebow, a senior research scientist at Battelle Memorial Institute, a company that develops and commercializes technology and manages laboratories for customers. "It's still exceptional rather than the main pattern," he says. But that could change. Liebow, a past president of the American Anthropological Association, says there's a growing demand in corporate America for practicing anthropologists.

But there are still considerable obstacles to widespread use of anthropologists in IT, Euchner says. He cites two main factors. "It's hard to justify the cost in ROI terms," he says. "The dominant trend -- routinizing the work, offshoring where you can -- drowns out other voices."

In addition, Euchner says many IT departments don't have the kind of environment that would welcome anthropologists. "An IT initiative that starts with the presumption that work is essentially something that needs to be processed, mapped, rationalized and systematized and that the people need to conform with that -- that's really not a place where an anthropologist will have a voice," he says.

Ironically, though, IT departments that work like that are the ones that could most benefit from the insight that anthropologists offer, Euchner says. "What can get lost under those pressures is a focus on how people do work, and that's what anthropologists bring to the table," he explains.

One of those anthropologists is Alexandra Mack, who works in research and development as part of the Advanced Concepts and Technology group at Pitney Bowes. She helps study work processes alongside other team members, including technologists. The team then uses the information to develop new technologies for various markets.

One of her teams recently studied how small businesses handle bulk mailing. As a result of that research, Pitney Bowes is developing a software application that will help them be more efficient in that process.

Bringing such practices to IT fits in with the overall push to align the tech world with the business realm, Mack and others acknowledge. But even given this alignment trend, Sachs says technologists still have limited ability to garner such insight on their own. "It's a very important thing that technologists are being asked to have a broader view, but they [still] see a problem from their frame of reference and they see a solution from their frame of reference," she explains.

But Wynn says even companies that don't hire anthropologists are benefiting from their work, as anthropological tools and approaches used in places such as Intel, IBM and Pitney Bowes bleed out to other companies. "The methods and approaches of anthropology have spread a lot," she says, "and with that, there is a potential for a very large impact."

Anthropologists in IT: The ROI

Studies showing the return on investment that anthropologists bring to IT are hard to come by -- if they exist at all, but Jim Euchner has some figures that proved the value to him.

As vice president of process improvement at Nynex in the early 1990s, Euchner oversaw the deployment of a system designed to diagnose problems with phone lines. To his surprise, workers in the 42 maintenance centers equipped with the new Maintenance Administration Expert (MAX) used it differently from site to site. Some managers loved it, while others hated it, saying it made their work harder.

Euchner was confused by the differences and, at the urging of another manager, hired anthropologist Patricia Sachs to figure out what had gone wrong and help fix it.

With her assistance, he discovered that there were problems with the way people perceived the system, the way management perceived the work and the way people were measured. "But with Pat's help, we were able to tweak the system to make it work differently for different people, so in the end everyone used it," he says.

Euchner estimated that it cost Nynex about $US1 million to develop and deploy MAX, which helped the company save $US4 million to $US6 million annually. Euchner points out that a healthy chunk of those savings would have been lost if MAX hadn't been used in all 42 maintenance centers.

Convinced that Sachs' insight as an anthropologist could have a significant and tangible impact, Euchner used her services once again in the mid-1990s. At that time, Nynex was losing market share to competitors that were able to provide high-speed data lines much more quickly than it could. Nynex officials wanted to know the reason for the lag.

Sachs led a team of Nynex workers charged with finding some answers. They learned that orders for high-speed lines took weeks to fill because they passed through multiple workers and systems. Sachs worked with Nynex employees to redesign the flow using existing technology.

As a result, Nynex cut the cycle time for orders from 30 days to just three, Euchner says. The company gained market share and cut the costs of filling an order in half.

Pratt is a Computerworld contributing writer in Waltham, Mass. Contact her at marykpratt@verizon.net.