> But the question begs - why hasnt computer/IT revolutionized productivity as much?

Powerpoint.

OK, that's a bit cryptic. The problem isn't just Powerpoint, but what Powerpoint represents is a part of the problem. Powerpoint is a tool that looks snazzy, is widely used, and yet is the wrong tool for almost any job.

Attend or read almost any well-regarded training on how to give effective presentations, and one of the first things you learn is that trying to reduce everything to crowded slides full of bullet points sucks as a way to convey information under almost any circumstances, and that proceeding to read that slide out in front of a captive audience makes it even less efficient than just e-mailing the slides around for them to read at their own pace. And yet, the business community is full of people, right up to the highest levels of management in the biggest companies, who still do this.

There are many other tools offered by modern IT that don't make us much more effective at doing useful work, but it's not always their fault. We see people spending hours fine-tuning Word documents by hitting Enter a few times to adjust the spacing. If those people had learned to use their tools, for example by defining a handful of styles using the perfectly capable stylesheet system Word offers, they would never have had to worry about those extra lines. In fact, they could have avoided the worry altogether if someone had just set up standard document templates in a central place and then got everyone else to use them.

This leads to a fundamental question about the kind of tools we build: are they intended for everyone to understand, or for specialists to understand and everyone else to just use? If the former, then the tools need to present their functionality in an accessible way to general users and the users need enough training to take advantage of what is available. If the latter, then the tools need to present their functionality efficiently for specialists, those specialists need enough training to use the power, and the tools need to prevent general users from inadvertently breaking what the specialists have set up for them. Right now, we have a whole world full of software that expects every user to be an expert and makes little allowance for genuine specialists to support their less able collagues, yet we have a whole world of management who expect people to sit down at work and just magically know how to use Office/SAP/Creative Suite/whatever.

In short, for all the power of modern IT, we aren't very good at using it to build tools that actually help us to do the jobs we need to do more effectively. To do that, we need to look at the jobs and fit the tools to them, not the other way around. We need to look at the difference between everyday users and specialists, and build tools accordingly, which might well mean working for both groups but helping one to support the other. And then we need to train both users and specialists to an appropriate level to use the tools they have effectively, with the genuine support of management.

We wouldn't expect an electrician to install a new power socket using only a mallet and a spade. We wouldn't expect an experienced driving instructor to teach someone to ride a motorbike when they'd never even ridden one themselves, just because it also goes on the same roads. We wouldn't expect a major CEO to go into a half-hour live TV interview without smart people briefing them first on both the material to be discussed and the image they need to project. We wouldn't expect someone who was excellent at giving change on their summer job to do the books for a small company without any accounting training.

So why do we keep building complex IT tools without thinking about who is going to use them, what for, and how the right tools could help?

Figure that out, and you'll figure out why IT doesn't really make us much more productive, and sometimes actually hurts.