ECJ EUROPEAN Cleaning Journal

Netherlands correspondent Nico Lemmens reports from a conference on the digital revolution.

In a previous issue of this journal, the Dutch contribution referred to certain technological developments that most probably will have consequences for the cleaning industry: robotisation, digitisation, bacterial or microbiological cleaning techniques and nanotechnology.

Recently the Dutch Association for Cleaning Research VSR organised a symposium devoted to the impact of the digital revolution on the cleaning industry, the management of cleaning processes in the digital world, robotics in cleaning and smart connected products. It was an impressive exhibition of exciting new vistas.

However history shows that is it impossible to predict the eventual applications of new technologies. Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press, foresaw no other application than the production of a limited number of bible copies. The inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, was convinced that his device would have no other use than to let people know that they were to receive a telegram. Thomas Newcomen and John Cally invented the steam engine in 1705. They never dreamt that it would cause an industrial revolution.

So we are well advised to be very cautious in making predictions about the eventual effects of digitisation and robotisation on the cleaning industry. Among experts there is no consensus at all about the effects of robotisation on employment in general. About 50 per cent of them are optimistic. The others don’t share this optimism at all.

Some experts predict that ‘Big Data’ (combined with robotisation and automation of processes) will give insight into all facility and cleaning processes within five years. They expect this so-called Mobile Workforce Management’to cause a revolution in building management and maintenance. And there are many others who predict that Big Data will change our future in unforeseen ways.

In his book on Big Data (the title is ‘Data-ism’) New York Times reporter Steve Lohr investigates the benefits of data while also examining its dark side. He points out that modern history is filled with examples of the myopic peril of focusing on data measurement (body counts in the Vietnam War, crime statistics in some police departments, and quarterly earnings in the corporate world).

Lohr quotes the social psychologist Donald Campbell in stating: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressure and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor.” Everyone with experience in the corporate world has witnessed the corrupting effects of quantitative targets, quantitative evaluations and budget politics.

These pitfalls are, to be fair, not caused by data in itself, but by the mechanisms that come into play once management is becoming focused too much on quantitative data. The late quality management guru W. Edwards Deming was brilliant in pointing this out. In making predictions about the future applications of Big Data in cleaning processes, we are well advised to not only focus on data, but to take also into account possible corrupting mechanisms the use of data might provoke.