Who murdered productivity?
Nstreet’s Blog
By Paul Nelson
Several years ago I was privileged to Chair the Canadian Information Productivity Awards (CIPA) Judging Committee. Over time, commitments to Visage Mobile, a start-up business in California, captured most of my attention. I was happy to give up the chairmanship, secure in the knowledge the Awards would endure.
Now I’m back in Ontario, retired and pleased to be invited to the occasional Chamber of Commerce breakfast meeting. At the end of January, I was especially interested in a presentation by Jim Milway, Executive Director, Institute for Competitiveness & Prosperity. Milway’s presentation quickly buried my smug attitude about Ontario’s productivity under a torrent of relevant facts. I was disappointed to hear Ontario’s per capita GDP is worse than 14 peer states in the USA, that Canadian managers are less well-educated than their American counterparts, and these same managers are much less committed to innovation and, as a result, productivity has suffered.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. Sometimes gradual change compounds itself and we just aren’t paying attention to the results. My head was with Jim Milway’s facts but my memories went back to the early 80’s when vendors touted Toronto as the “large scale computer capital of the world” with more large-scale computers per capita than any other city. I was beginning to see myself as a misinformed leftover. As a college student, I used to travel by train between western Pennsylvania and Chicago. During the night we would pass a huge decayed factory in northern Ohio. The peeling paint said “Nothing Cools Like Ice”. As I get older, I understand the message a lot better.
When I got home from the breakfast meeting, I turned to my trusty computer and Googled cipa.com to see what notable pieces of technology and innovation CIPA had unveiled during the past couple of years. To my amazement, CIPA was gone It wasn’t like there was an untended, ghost town web site, cipa.com was just plain gone; no wreckage, no nothing, except a “Site Under Construction” sign right out of the early 90’s.
I don’t remember my reaction when I figured out the real story on Santa Claus, but it was no big deal. More recently, my favourite lunch spot in Scottsdale, AZ went out of business. Country Glazed Ham had Chimayo Ranch Salads to die for, rich flavourful coffee and energized, attentive staff. But one day it just closed. The locals miss it as much as I do. They said it was because of a death in the family. The death of CIPA is a lot worse. I think of the thousands of award attendees honouring hundreds of exciting Information Technology innovators, thousands of volunteer hours and millions of dollars in production costs. I’m wondering what killed Canada’s Academy Awards for Productivity.
Maybe it was murder.
