Sites of Knowledge and Social Locations:

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Sites of Knowledge and Social Locations

• Manufacturing Software

A Talk by Robert L. Frost School of
Information September 23, 2002
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Fordism in Crisis , 1975-1985

• Oil crisis and the wrong product mix
• Icon of crisis Chrysler products in vacant lots
  all over SE Michigan, 1980
• Losers of WWII emerge as more modernand more
  innovativerivals
• End of 20th-century wave of tech innovation in
  industry symbolized by reconfigurable robots in
  fixed production lines
• Bureaucratic overload and the ageing of
  management the logic of in-house promotions and
  non-transferable knowledge
• The end of the Shirley Culliton Age

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The Crisis of Information

• Bureaucratization
• Intermittent and uneven computerization w/
  incompatible systems and nomenclatures (the
  Wang/Xerox moment)
• Functionality vs. traditional hierarchies
• The tree vs getting work done
• Market-driven, innovation-driven?
• Who defines optimal and who reports to whom?
• Funding RD, the requisite info flows
• Blue sky vs. lean and meandisconnections
• Product redesign as panacea?

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(No Transcript)
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Tangled Information Flows

• The downsides of the multidivisional firm
• Parallel and conflicting info flows by division
• Example HR vs. performance measurement
• Different notions of optimization between
  engineering and accounting and therefore,
  different conflicting info needs
• Problems of org charts and practices
• Objects standardized, terminology not
• Long lead times and information loops
• Product design, market research, machine tool
  design
• Interim solution price to market, not to
  costthe MCP debate
• No-bid matricies of subcontractors and firms
  based on p2p procedures consequent inertia

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Miscasting the User

• User as consumer, business intermediary,
  subcontractor, or employee
• Inattentiveness to user needs, and marketing
  framework couldnt address it

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An Aside Inventing the Worker and the User

• Designs as prescriptions (Akrich)
• To invent the object is to invent the user
• The perils of abstraction
• Conflicts of situated knowledge
• Solution reinvent the worker and the user?

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The Idealized Washerwoman, 1924
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The Actual Washerwoman, 1928
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Post-Fordist Options

• Deming and concurrent engineering Japanese
  ship-building Volvo and work-groups
  business-process reengineering
• The hollow-firm and global outsourcing
• Customized mass production (Scranton)
• Control knowledge and markets, let lower-wage
  zones do the work
• Flexible specialization and regionalist
  strategies (Piore/Sabel/Zeitlin, Florida)

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Problems of concurrent engineering, BPR,
flattening the hierarchy, etc.

• Conflicting chains of command and
  incoherent/contradictory reward structures
• Rearranging deck chairs?
• Intra-/interprofessional conflicts
• Need to recast info flows, but
• division in location and context between s/w
  designers and manufacturers
• custom or generic solutions? (Taylor redux!)
• What really are Brightspire, Fuego 4, ARIS 6,
  Intalion3, e-Work, BusinessManager, Process
  Suite, and Workflow Suite? BPI vs. production
  integration
• Inertia of habit Covisent?

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Problems of Global Outsourcing

• Long lead times inventory costs the TJ Maxx
  example
• Irregular information flows
• Problems of trust lead to contracting by habit
• NGO human-rights opposition
• Race to the bottom
• Lack of global standards practices emergence
  of ISO 9000 family, but can it all be
  implemented?

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Problems of Customized Mass Production

• Reliance on wetware embodied skill
• Scalability reliant upon p2p knowledge
  transmission
• Provinciality
• Nonetheless, an interesting inversion of
  Taylorism!

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Problems of Global Knowledge/Execution Division
of Labor

• Based on large gap in cost of labor vs. cost of
  ideas thus need for non-credible global
  enforcement of IP rights
• Balance-of-payments
• Downsides of interdependence wars, trade wars,
  NGO opposition
• The periphery will learn copy

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Problemsand Advantagesof Flexible Specialization

• Need for significant public and infrastructural
  investments (Reich, Florida)
• Need to overcome organizational inertia
• But(!)
• Closing distance between s/w writers and users of
  CAD/CAM/CAE (Flextronics) closes
  conceptualization/execution gap
• Allows rapid redeployment and adaptation
• Facilitates knowledge flows among
  regionally-based firms (implicitly circumventing
  IP laws/regs) (Sabel)
• In general, maximizes p2p transmission of
  knowledge practices

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CATIA The Post-Fordist Solution from the
Engineers

• What is CATIA?
• Total manufacturing enterprise integration
  softwaremarketed as BPI by Dassault/IBM
• Includes CAD/CAM/CAE, accounting, inventory
  control, process control, etc.
• Standards buzz-word compliant
• Massive complicated-system and process
  simulation rapid simulated prototyping
• Paperless design, no fitters, no real
  prototyping
• The ultimate tool for BPR, or more?

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CATIAs Pedigree

• Developed at Dassault (Toulouse) ca. 1985, for
  the Miragenot an atypical product of French
  engineering style top-down
• Adopted by Boeing for production of 777
• Initially on IBM mainframe, so IBM as US agent
  intermediary
• Simultaneous workstation/terminal access for
  thousands now in client-server framework
• At Boeing, interaction with UAL employees, and
  latters observations could be implemented into
  777 design
• Near-perfect fits

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Aspects of Elegance, I

• Standards and buzz-word compliance facilitates
  global outsourcing
• Australian tail sections, Japanese wing sections
  (preventative measure to make Japanese airframe
  makers into subbers, not rivals)
• Locks in subcontractors
• ISO 900X compliance assures communicability and
  accessibility of details, metadata, and
  nomenclatures

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Aspects of Elegance, II

• User-participant design with UAL (yet not on s/w
  design side)
• Enables concurrent engineering and the end of
  over the partition design engineering
• Reduces change-order loops
• Provides knowledge base for entire firm
• Integrates finops with engineering
• Simulates constructability by use of the virtual
  worker
• Ability to generate operations/maintenance
  documentation for users at same moment as
  airframe is built

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Ironiesand Advantage

• The 777 new, old plane with a few twists
• Market goal for 777 a capacity and range between
  the 767 and 747
• Two more efficient engines therefore a smaller
  cockpit crew greater range
• Fly-by-wire reduces moving parts and lowers
  maintenance costs also makes avionics and
  control-surface software accessible by designers
• Irony pilots get solenoid-driven resistant stick
  to ease transition to FBW, machinists stuck with
  numbers
• Yields comparability in production and
  performance against Airbus and other Boeing
  products an analytical object

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But Is It for Real?Research Questions, I

• Can the social processes of production be
  transcended by software?
• Old model of engineering practice with subtle
  hierarchies among tasks and types do engineers
  consent to software obviating those conflicts?
• Can CATIA capture the subtleties of union work
  rules and negotiations with Machinists? Will IAM
  allow the virtual worker to be its voice in the
  software? Who has voice in production design?
  (Echoes issues in recent West Coast
  longshoremens dispute)
• Who really calls the shots politically
  engineers, finance people, or external software
  writers? Do the latter become the new masters of
  production at the expense of the other two?
  forget the workers!

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Research Questions, II

• How reliable are the instantiations and
  simulations? Can engineering-based conceptions of
  information credibly be placed at the core of
  production?
• History of Taylorism tells us that embodied
  knowledge and skill are very elusive (Frost,
  Hedstrom, Zuboff)
• How well can disparate operations with a firm be
  integrated into a single information system?
• What does this imply for the use of metadata and
  the consequent need for controlled vocabularies,
  and who has to learn new languages/terminology to
  do their jobs?
• Generally, does the process of downward-instantiat
  ion (French style) square well with upward
  abstraction (American style)?

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Research Questions, III

• Can CATIA and its cousins serve as a model for
  informated manufacturing and a path to a new
  industrial model?
• Are BPI software and other managerial information
  approaches commensurable with engineering-based
  CAD/CAM/CAE systems, or are the incompatibilities
  in between the two subcultures too profound?
• Can information flows suitable for managerial
  practice parallel those of engineering practice?
• Where to back office operations fit into this?
• What expanded skill sets other than software
  engineering are needed to implement the CATIA
  approach?

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Methodology

• Qualitative
• User interviews, from engineers to managers and
  IAM reps
• Company records archivescircumvent the gee
  whiz public pronouncements, except to decode
  them
• Ethnography and observation
• Sites Everett and Toulouse
• Learn from 504s study of M-Pathways
• Backup plan automotive

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Conclusion

• The social study of industrial informatics offers
  a new realm of expertise for SI, yet integrates
  areas
• User-interface and design issues with an
  ethnographic turn
• Record system design and maintenance
• Data description emulation
• User studies
• This research vector, learning from industrial
  history yet looking forward, might offer a future
  for southeast Michigan after the SUV.
• Indeed, how to make enterprises work better,
  achieving greater flexibility

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Thank you!