Re: Productivity numbers have a problem
Tell that to the airline industry. Automation has cut headcount massively over the years. Productivity in the industry is, IMO, misattributed to plane technologoy or deregulation, but in reality, an airline is a complex set of computer systems with wings. Banking too is mostly IT and has been for a long time.
Having been around since the dawn of the microcomputer and it's regular use in the late 1900s, I can attest to the increase in productivity of tasks such as documentation; it is taken for granted now that failing to do documentation is much less cost saving than failing to do documenation was when it had to go to the typing pool, come back, be proof-read and marked up in pencil, returned to the typing pool and eventually filed in a room full of spiders. Now you have to find project overruns from somewhere else, QA usually.