On that note, my personal hypothesis, even more controversial than "IT unproductive hypotheses" in the article that means IT was a rounding error relative to earlier major improvements, is: in many areas - particularly in office work and all kinds of everyday errands - IT is
anti-productive, as in it makes people
less productive on the net.
The core hypothesis behind my belief is that introduction of computers to replace a class of tasks - up to and including a whole job type - is just shifting the workload, diffusing it across many people, where previously it was concentrated in smaller number of specialists. Think e.g. the things you use Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, etc. (or their equivalents from other vendors) for - before software ate it, a lot of that used to be someone's job. Now, it's just tacked onto everyone's workload, distracting people from doing the actual job they were paid to.
That would seem like obviously stupid way to do, so why would businesses all fall for it? I argue it's because even as shifting the workload makes everyone in the company less productive on the net, it looks like an improvement to accounting. Jobs with salaries are legible, clearly visible on the balance sheets. So is money saved by eliminating them. However, the overall productivity drop caused by smearing that same work across rest of the company? That's incremental, not obviously quantifiable. People and their salaries stay the same. So it all looks like introducing software and obsoleting some jobs saves everyone money - but then somehow, everyone is experiencing a "productivity paradox". But it's not a paradox if you ignore the financial metrics with their low resolution - focusing on what happens to work, it seems that IT improvements are mostly a lie.