Human Factor Engineering

Human engineering or human factors engineering, also called ergonomics, is the science of designing machines, products, and systems to maximize the safety, comfort, and efficiency of the people who use them. This area is a vital component of future.

The comparison between speed and liveliness of current technological advance with the tardiness and unevenness has always marked educational developments. This comparison is between invention and the processes by which people appreciate, accept and use invention.

The human factor engineers draw on the principles of industrial engineering, psychology, anthropometry (the science of human measurement), and biomechanics (the study of muscular activity) to adapt the design of products and workplaces to people’s sizes and shapes and their physical strengths and limitations. They also consider the speed with which humans react and how they process information, and their capacities for dealing with psychological factors, such as stress or isolation. Armed with this complete picture of how humans interact with their environment, human factor engineers develop the best possible design for products and systems, ranging from the handle of a toothbrush to the flight deck of the space shuttle.

The future holds promise for ergonomically designed system to provide optimum performance and takes advantage of the strengths and weaknesses of both its human and machine components.

The ergonomics will prevent workplace illness and accidents resulting from continuous repetition of the same motions. The injuries that may be caused will be exacerbated by awkward postures, such as bending or reaching.

Ergonomists will work to eliminate such health problems by designing workplaces, such as offices or assembly lines, with injury prevention in mind. They will position tools and machinery accessible without twisting, reaching, or bending; design adjustable workbenches, desks, and chairs to comfortably accommodate workers of many different sizes, preventing the need to continuously lean or overextend the arms. They will also determine and design safe workplace environmental conditions, such as correct temperature, lighting, noise, and ventilation to ensure that workers perform under optimal conditions.

Ergonomists will seek to increase worker efficiency and productivity when designing workspaces. They will place those pieces of equipment used most frequently in closest proximity to the worker and arrange systems in ways that are convenient and easy to use. Well-designed workspaces will thus ensure workers perform their jobs in optimal comfort, without experiencing unnecessary physical and mental fatigue that can slow work performance, reduce accuracy, or cause accidents.

They will design individual tools and equipment for use of workers, such as, curved computer keyboards to encourage typists to hold their wrists in a position that is less likely to cause carpal tunnel syndrome; to protect the eyes from incessant glare, ergonomically designed computer monitors will be equipped with glare reduction screens. Ergonomically designed chairs will distribute a person’s body weight evenly to avoid back and neck strain. These chairs adjusted to a user’s height will ensure that the feet rest flat on the ground. In factories and assembly lines, ergonomically designed knobs and levers positioned appropriately so as not to require reaching, and these knobs and levers also require minimal force to trip.

Some ergonomists will practice in the area of job design, thus helping employers assess both the individual tasks necessary to perform a particular job and the skills needed to accomplish each task. By grouping like tasks and skills, jobs will be redesigned to maximize efficiency. An office telephone receptionist, for example, will perform a number of other tasks as varied as filing, sorting mail, and bookkeeping. Grouping these responsibilities, will all be performed in the vicinity of the office telephone system, making use of the receptionist’s time when there are no telephone calls. Ergonomists will help employers evaluate different ways of organizing workdays to increase worker productivity, ensuring that workers have adequate breaks and rest periods, as well as a well-defined set of tasks.

The work of cognitive ergonomists will be particularly evident in public transportation buildings, such as airports or train stations. These buildings are often large, complex, and difficult to navigate. Cognitive ergonomists will develop clear, easy-to-understand navigation aids, such as signs and maps, to help people find their way to their gate as simply and efficiently as possible. Color-coded subway maps, for example, will help subway riders navigate with relative ease through a complicated maze of interconnected underground tunnels.

Ergonomic design will make consumer products safer, easier to use, and more reliable. In many manufacturing industries, ergonomists will work with designers to develop products that fit the bodies and meet the expectations of the people who use them. An ergonomically designed toothbrush, for example, will have a broad handle for easy grip, bent neck for easier access to back teeth, and a bristle head shaped for better tooth surface contact. The shaving razor has already undergone a similar design revolution.

Ergonomics will become increasingly concerned with future marketing. This is the discipline of modeling future social and lifestyle trends in order to inform design and marketing strategy to deliver an offer and a brand image that will appeal to users over the medium to long term.

It is often suggested that the great increase of automatic controls for practical purposes will lead to widespread unemployment. This is unlikely, except perhaps as a temporary phenomenon. The future will still have a vast demand for people to improve, monitor and especially to maintain the necessary instruments. Also there will be an increasing tendency towards shorter working hours and a great increase of leisure time activities, which will absorb a larger and larger amount of employment.

We have got to go all out to learn how to balance reduction of conditions irrelevant to efficiency against increase of efficiency range. Most operatives will be combining two or more jobs, which have generally been regarded as different, and as requiring different performers. This future is in the neighborhood. Asif J. Mir, Organizational Transformation

Seeking new Pastures in Education

The state of education in Pakistan is depressing. Today we cannot compete even with third-rate countries in standard indicators of academic achievement. Weak curricula and discipline have guaranteed educational failure for tens of millions of our children. The nation should therefore look to itself and conclude that something must be done.

We are perhaps after increasing the number of educational institutions and ignoring the future of education, which is about the demise of the classroom-based teacher, and an information technology lead revolution in schools, colleges and universities.

For meeting our future economic needs, we must not lose sight of the fact that education is a process, not a commodity. It benefits the individual, and society as a whole, in all sorts of ways that are not necessarily quantifiable in terms of our national balance sheet.

Developed societies use teachers not as objects, but engines of education reform. Contrarily, our policymakers use them not as engines but tail cabins. Thus teachers are not involved in policy process for education. We need to see teachers as custodians of intellectual and cultural tradition, not servants of a government mission.

The report of the Pakistan Task Force on Improvement of Higher Education estimates that 18 million people are in the age between 17 to 23 years, eligible for tertiary education. Out of them, only 475,000 (or about 2.6%) are actually enrolled in higher education institutions. This proportion is among the lowest in the world: India (in 1990) had a tertiary enrolment ratio of 6.2%, while Iran (in 1994) had 12.7%. This is pathetic. It asks for direction and relevancy of higher education research.

Higher education in Turkey is worth talking about. The average annual growth rate of students in higher education in Turkey during the period 1980-85 was one of the highest in the world: 14.1% as compared to 7.8%in Canada, 5.0% in the UK, 1.4% in Italy, 0.2% in the US, -0.2% in Hungary, and -5.3% in Poland. The number of students enrolled in engineering is high: 18.33 %of the total enrollment as compared to 8.20 %in Italy, 7.90 %in Austria, and 3.29 %in France. In the area of higher education, can we seek some route from Turkey’s experience?

People need more education than ever before, and distance learning—connecting cable and classroom—offers a way to meet that need. Internet delivers course material to homes or offices. Discussions, assignments and exams are being done online. Some of these are courses offered by traditional universities, of which the University of Phoenix is the largest, some by accredited virtual universities with no on-campus instruction and some by unaccredited institutions. For many students, however, especially those with full-time jobs or those far from campuses, the savings in commuting and the flexibility to make their own schedules make the total cost less than that of alternatives.

The concept of virtual university is not a bad idea, which Pakistan must adopt at a large scale. It can distribute cheap Internet access and classroom content to modular learning kiosks in several thousand villages. Distributing several thousand simple, mass-produced kiosks might be less expensive than creating even one old-style university campus.

Pakistan has recently allocated resources greater than ever before. Nonetheless, it didn’t fully utilize even what paltry had been allocated earlier. Owing to intricate bureaucratic labyrinth drawing money is like pulling teeth. Consequently, the trend of spending in Pakistan is far less than the allocated money in all eight plans. There are around twenty-two steps to draw the allocated money. For survival in the new world, Pakistan has got to adopt new ways of governance.

South Korea offers an interesting paradigm in modern history. Most observers agree that it's spectacular progress in modernization and economic growth since the Korean War is largely attributed to the willingness of individuals to invest a large amount of resources in education.

Korea's liberation from Japan marked a turning point in the history of education. As the country underwent a transition from totalitarian rule to democracy, a primary concern was to provide everybody with equal educational opportunities. The period from 1945 to 1970 witnessed a dramatic expansion of education. In spite of the widespread destruction and economic suffering brought about by the Korean War (1950-1953), Korea succeeded in virtually eliminating illiteracy. Such a rapid expansion was naturally accompanied by problems, the most serious being deterioration in the quality of education. As the 1960s drew to a close, Korea's educators turned their attention to these problems and several projects were launched to improve the curricula and the methods of instruction

Although only primary school was compulsory in Korea, proportion of age-groups of children and young people enrolled in primary, secondary, and tertiary level schools were equivalent to those found in industrialized countries, including Japan. The percentage of students going on to optional middle school the same year was more than 99 percent. Approximately 34 percent, one of the world's highest rates of secondary-school graduates attended institutions of higher education in 1987, a rate similar to Japan's (about 30 percent) and exceeding Britain's (20 percent). The number of students in higher education had risen from 100,000 in 1960 to 1.3 million in 1987, and the proportion of college-age students in higher education institutions was second only to the United States.

Can Pakistan learn from the South Korean experience that explains the important role of education in its evolution from one of the world's poorest countries 50 years ago eating dogs to fuel the stomach, into a major economic success today?

A serious look at the state of the world raises a question regarding the thought process of Pakistan’s decision makers. Years of traditional education are no guarantee of a mature intellect. Entrenched mentalities need to change or institutions will continue to play the same old games and repeat the same old tunes. Schools of the future have an opportunity and responsibility to change the tune. Asif J. Mir Organizational Transformation

Cutting out a Pro-Poor Budget

In developing countries each time the budget has come, it means the elimination of benefits for the poor and elevated benefits for the rich. The hopes of the governments for making their countries as the most vibrant economies are laudable but the development policies have no relevance to the man in street.

The majority of the people in poor countries yearns for a pro-poor budget. Promoting pro-poor growth requires a strategy that is deliberately biased in favor of the poor so that the poor benefit proportionally more than the rich.

In general a pro-poor budget is one that takes into account the needs of the poor. It is one that seeks to make a difference in the lives of the poor. It is one that would impact positively on the poor so as to enable them to actively participate in and benefit from the process of development. A pro-poor budget would enable the poor to have increased opportunities In order to be healthy, educated, productive and responsible people. Such a budget would have to have a deliberate bias so that the poor would benefit proportionately more from government expenditure than the rich.

The first step in achieving a pro-poor budget is the identification of who the poor are. The understanding and measurement of poverty has evolved over time. Today it is generally accepted that poverty is not only a money related deprivation, but a combination of several deprivations that result in lack of well being. Consequently budget provisions must respond, to this complex situation of poverty. This is no easy task. In formulating a pro-poor budget there is need to have up to date information of the levels, intensity and types of deprivations that make up poverty.

There are many reasons, both practical and strategic, to establish a conceptual linkage between gender and poverty for promoting gender-sensitive budgets. It would be a mistake to simply equate the two categories. Gender imbalances and inequalities should run across every social, economic and political classification. The exclusion and deprivation experienced by the poor is not the same, and tends to be even more acute for women than for men. Gender allows us to stop envisioning the poor as a homogeneous category of people, whose needs can be addressed in a uniform way.

Pro-poor growth should direct resources disproportionately to the sectors in which the poor work (e.g. agriculture), areas in which they live (underdeveloped regions), factors of production which they posses (such as unskilled labor), outputs, which they consume (such as food), translated into strategy of pro-poor growth - employment generation combined with price stability of goods and services which are essential items. Policies need to be designed to reflect concerns of poverty.

In order to address poverty effectively the budget will need to have more direct rather than indirect means of taxation. This would help reduce prevailing high-income inequalities and help spread the benefits of economic growth.

Pro-poor growth means that the poor benefit disproportionately from economic growth. This is to say the proportional income growth (i.e. their income growth rate) of the poor must exceed the average income growth rate. The per-capita income growth rate of the poor must exceed growth rate.

Three obvious policy messages emerge. First, policies to promote growth should help the poor although they could do so more if they made growth pro-poor rather than neutral as it currently is. Second, reducing initial inequality, particularly asset inequality, should receive highest priority, due to its triple effect on poverty. Third, reducing gender inequality should equally be of highest concern to policy makers that want to achieve pro-poor growth.

It is clear that pro-poor growth that directly reduces poverty must be in sectors where the poor are and use the factors of production they possess. The vast majority of the poor is in rural areas, a majority depends directly or indirectly on agriculture for their livelihood, and the factor of production the poor possess and use most is labor, sometimes land, and even more rarely human capital. Thus pro-poor growth must be focused on rural areas, improve incomes and productivity in agriculture, and must make intensive use of labor. These things are nearly tautological, but often forgotten and are clearly not reflected in public policies or in the allocation of public funds by national governments or donors.

Heavy investment in the human capital of the poor will yield two benefits on poverty reduction. It will increase economic growth and it will make growth more pro-poor. The record of East Asia is a good illustration where high human capital accumulation promoted growth and poverty reduction.

Beyond a concern for increasing average incomes and reducing poverty, there is a greater appreciation for a need to enhance the security for the population if one is to ensure sustainable pro-poor growth. The security of the poor is threatened by physical threats. Thus, the poor are forced to avoid risks that may carry high rewards, can get trapped in cycles of poverty and insecurity, and are regularly pummeled by shocks that militate against sustainable reductions in poverty.

Our budget-makers need to remember that real enemy is poverty and deprivation, that their key weapon is their skill and professionalism and that their modus operandi is their humility. They are the custodians of a value system that defines our objective as demonstrating every single day that we are a caring democracy.

Attaining a pro-poor budget is a big challenge. It requires a bottom-up approach; that ensures that poverty eradication is a central issue and not a donor driven requirement. The principles of equity and accountability with particular attention to efficiency and effectiveness have to be continually respected at each stage of the budget process. www.asifjmir.com

21st Century Companies

growth, Organizational leaders agree that versatility and the ability to envision possibilities set a plan of action in the midst of chaos are qualities, which produce success. Organizations need more than members who adapt to changes. More importantly, they need members who can produce changes within the organization. Organizations of 21st century need leaders.

Successful companies have figured out the secret to success in the 21st century - that of process excellence. Future success seems will come to those companies that figure out functional management innovations in the 20th century augmented with process excellence, which places more emphasis on end-customer satisfaction than optimal utilization of company resources.

The 20th century saw organizations embrace functional management concepts that divide the company into functional silos such as product design and management, order management, manufacturing, finance, sales/marketing, warehousing/logistics and customer service/support. This approach saw the growth of many large companies. Functional management concepts help streamline an otherwise chaotic set of activities into logical groups and helped large organizations function effectively. They helped organizations make the transition from an agricultural age to an industrial age.

Since the last decades of the 20th century, computer technology and communications have become cheaper and more powerful by orders of magnitude, in the rendering many of these 20th century functional management approaches obsolete. The 21st century demands a transition from an industrial age to an information age, and a process-excellence approach is the alternative that will augment a functional management approach for optimal organizational performance.

Organizations have started talking about order to cash cycles, viewing the end-to-end demand chain and supply chain from customers’ point of view rather than functional silos such as finance, sales and marketing and manufacturing.

This process excellence view has evolved from companies’ realization that it is an unfair burden on the end customer to have to deal with the companies’ functional silos when doing so adds no additional value to the products or services they buy from the organization. Functional silos are for internal efficiencies of a company. A number of trends dictate that only process excellence combined with functional management will work in the future.

The 21st century has starting out with computers and communications enabling order of magnitude and faster, cheaper execution of business processes, often spanning multiple organizations and even multiple continents. Dell, UPS and FedEx have computer systems that any organization can seamlessly integrate with and provide visibility of processes to end-customers. Here, the emphasis seems to have shifted considerably to one of process excellence rather than functional excellence. In fact, UPS formerly picked up Toshiba laptops that customers want to send back to the company for Warranty repairs. Now UPS finds it can deliver a more efficient and effective process by also doing the repairs in their delivery center.

If I am an end customer of a company that sells me goods or services, I am more impressed by efficient and effective processes that benefit me, rather than how well the functional silos if they perform internally. Process excellence is one of whether the end customer’s expectations are met faster, cheaper and more effectively. Many organizations have started asking the question regarding any activity within a company: why should the customer care? This brings up a process orientation to most activities even if different functional silos within a company perform parts of processes. If an activity does not directly add value to the end customer, process excellence demands that you try to eliminate it or at least make it faster.

Many organizations are starting to make available single points of contact for customers, especially their valued ones. These single points of contact or account managers navigate the internal processes with the functional silos of the company on behalf of the customer within the organization and get things done. After all, why should the customer care about billing and provisioning departments of a telecommunications company? They have placed an order for a new landline and it is the telecom company's responsibility to take the order and deliver the landline. Process excellence is the key here.

Those that have slower process cycles do not stand a chance of competing very effectively in the longer run with nimbler online alternatives. A very heavy process orientation and excellence is the only way the older ways of doing business can right themselves and prepare for the 21st century.

With digitization and automated workflow, people within the company or an outsourcing vendor can perform the same business process without concern about physical location! Digitization and automated workflow have enabled process excellence to be realized at levels not possible before.

Companies such as UPS and FedEx already make it possible for any company's computers integrate with their internal systems effortlessly, eliminating unnecessary and inefficient manual steps between companies. For example, once an order is picked and packed at a company warehouse, the company computers can talk to UPS or FedEx computers and create a delivery order and a tracking number. UPS or FedEx employees will not have to key in all these details again.

General Electric and Motorola have popularized Six Sigma approaches to quality management. Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma impose a process discipline when applied. These are increasingly being applied outside of manufacturing, where they originated, and being applied to all kinds of business processes like product service and support, healthcare and so on.

The last century contributed functional management as a way to do things more efficiently and effectively within organizations. However advances in technology and innovative new companies have brought process-oriented approaches to doing things that make it easy for an end customer to do business with them. A process orientation and process excellence that augments functional management seems to be the secret to success in the 21st century. Organizations that leverage the latest technological advances and trends in a relentless quest to make business processes more efficient and effective will be the only ones that survive. (www.asifjmir.com)

Nothing for it but . . .

Ever since independence technology has sneaked in tardily. Paradoxically, these years have produced equally strident laments concerning the state to which Pakistan’s education has sunk. The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a nation and a people.

When information technology was approaching in the sixties the US changed the school curricula for preparing students for the future. Contrarily we continue to turn our eye from the need to adopt new technologies and consequently our students are not being prepared (IT students included) to live in a competitive world.

We have managed to survive without adoption of IT for forty years. It will be impossible to continue to exist even for a day if we failed to adopt the approaching technologies. For instance Nanotechnology—examining the world at a millionth of meter and utilizing the ability to manipulate our universe at a molecular or atomic perspective—has united scientists across developed world in the belief that the worlds of medicine, computers, biotechnologies and eventually all manufacturing will never be approached in the same way again. We can’t afford to respond as laggards and follow the same doom which ancient civilizations faced. They perished for resistance to new technologies.

In ancient Greece then, all of the energy sources in use today, with the exception of nuclear power and hydroelectric power (both used exclusively to produce electricity) were known, available, and in limited use. Why then did it take so many centuries for energy sources and technology to come together to produce the Industrial Revolution?

From ancient Greece into the early Renaissance technological development was not only frowned upon, it was downright discouraged. People with money did not invest in it. It was socially unacceptable for the elite to involve themselves in what they considered a degrading activity.

The Greek philosophers, for all of their delving into how the world was made up and how things worked, had a strong aversion to the development of technology. They called it banausikon, meaning, fit for mechanics. It was considered a filthy business beneath the dignity of any intelligent, thinking person. Aristotle held that industries that earned wages degraded the mind and were unworthy of the free man. He would not stoop so low as to attempt to verify by measured observation his reasoning concerning physics or dynamics. As a result, some bad science went unchallenged for almost 2,000 years.

The Museum and Library at Alexandria, established in 290 BC by the rulers of Egypt, was a research facility that attracted scientists from around the known world. Researchers would use valves, expanding gases, solar thermal power, cams, screws, pulleys, levers, springs, siphons, and cogs—the basics for an industrial revolution. They developed double-action pumps and a compressed air cannon. It was there that Hero demonstrated a steam reaction turbine in 60 AD. The Library at Alexandria could have been an ancient model for Silicon Valley, but the research did not lead to improved manufacturing processes, better machines for industry or agriculture, or even for increasing wealth. Rather it was used to amuse royalty or to amaze worshipers in temples.

A valid argument can be made that metallurgy, manufacturing processes, and transportation facilities were too primitive to allow for exploitation of energy and technology at that time. But, absent the social barrier to technological development that existed, it is likely that the great minds, the available wealth, and the power concentrated in the likes of Alexander the Great, and the Roman Emperors could have laid the groundwork for a much earlier development and diffusion of technology.

We are accustomed to resist technological change with full force. We not only refuse to recognize it; we close our eyes to evade it. The attitude that we demonstrate confirms our nasty characterization as a nation of laggards.

Embracing technology is a laudable objective for which our society must aspire. It should provide a classic demonstration of the principles of the Technology Adoption Lifecycle and attempt to explain the pros and cons of investing in new technology. It must transform itself as innovators, early adopters, and not as laggards on a technology adoption timeline.

We should inculcate education of technology at every level of learning. If we claim to know more about how people learn, if we have better tools for facilitating learning, why do so many studies of technology in education show no significant difference from traditional methods? Why are we producing graduates less able to cope with the issues facing them?

Making matters worse, the criteria for success have changed. Our institutions were designed not for an industrial society. Now we've entered the Information Age. Increasingly, even blue-collar jobs require critical thinking, rather than monotonous task performance. To meet these demands, our graduates need different competencies than we typically provide. Intuitively, one would expect technology to be a powerful tool for meeting these new requirements.

We are entering a world in which jobs are requiring technological competency--a world in which they must continue to update their occupational and technological skills in order to be successful. We must enable them to become technologically competent. We must take advantage of the capacity of technology to enhance our traditional classroom presentations and to engage our students in active learning.

Pakistan’s decision-makers must focus on new challenges and issues instead of waiting for emergencies to react. They need to focus more on policy than management issues. They need to be knowledgeable about what rest of the world is doing to achieve change. They should know that change and implementing technology often go hand in hand. The key to success in both is a thorough, inclusive planning process. The disregard of new technologies by ancient civilizations offers us a choice: to embrace new technologies or perish.(www.asifjmir.com)