Peter Brödner

Peter Brödner

Peter Brödner (born February 19, 1942 in Berlin ) is a German business IT specialist , work and organizational researcher.

The core of Brödner's research work is the humane and socially acceptable design of work, computer technology and organization in production under the guiding principle of the former Federal Minister Hans Matthöfer “ Increase in productivity by improving working conditions”.

Life

Brödner completed his mechanical engineering studies (production engineering) at the Technical University of Berlin (TUB) in October 1967 with a diploma and received his doctorate there in February 1974 as a doctoral engineer with a dissertation on "Algorithms for optimizing process planning in workshop production". From 1968 to 1974 he conducted research at the Institute for Production Automation at the TUB in the fields of CNC technology and production planning and control. As an assistant representative in the faculty council, he helped set up the computer science course at TUB. He then worked as a lecturer in mathematics, statistics and data processing at the Berlin University of Applied Sciences .

From 1976 to 1979 Brödner worked as a project manager for industry-oriented R&D projects in the areas of flexible production automation and humanization of work for the project management agency Humanization of Working Life at the DFVLR in Bonn . He continued his work as a project manager for industry-oriented R&D joint projects from 1980 to 1989 at the project management agency for manufacturing technology at the Karlsruhe Research Center in the areas of flexible factory automation (including CNC technology), production planning and control, flexible manufacturing systems and CIM strategies. Industry-driven joint projects included workshop-oriented programming methods for CNC machines, cell production and flexible production systems, shortening of set-up times, production process monitoring and quality assurance in flexible production systems.

In 1985 Brödner was a visiting scientist at the Social Science Research Center in Berlin, where he worked on alternative, human-centered CIM strategies (this is where the book Fabrik 2000 was written ). In this context he was appointed chairman of the CEC-FAST working group on strategic options for new production systems Computer and Human Integrated Manufacturing CHIM in 1986 .

In addition to these activities, Brödner worked from 1970 to 1995 as a member and from 1980 as chairman of the German Control Engineering Standards Committee . Terms and designations (UK 921.1 of the DKE in DIN) in the new version of the family of standards supported by digitization. From 1989 to 2005 he was Research Director of the Production Systems Department at the NRW Science Center, Institute Work and Technology, Gelsenkirchen, with the main research areas: human-friendly design of computer-aided work, organizational change and change management and sustainable work systems .

Membership in numerous scientific societies ( IFAC , GI , FIfF ) as well as in advisory boards of professional journals and conferences complement his activities.

Brödner has been retired since 2005, but is also active as an honorary professor for business informatics at the University of Siegen , for example in research consulting and results assurance for R&D projects on information systems, as a co-author of several specialist articles on the design of information systems and in teaching various master’s degrees Degree programs with the regular event “IT in Organizations”.

Peter Brödner was elected as a member of the learned society Leibniz Society of Sciences in Berlin in 2016.

Research and design focus

Contrary to technology-centered explanations of economic and social change based on the ideas of technological determinism , Brödner researched the design of work and technology, especially the computer systems used. Even in the early days of using numerically controlled machine tools, there was considerable room for technical and organizational design. Brödner later used it to develop workshop-oriented programming methods that enabled skilled workers to create even complex NC programs on machine tools on site. In contrast to the then prevailing practices of programming and quality assurance outsourced to technical departments, this enabled their knowledge to be used and developed and, at the same time, the overall productivity of the operational added value to be increased.

With rapidly growing dynamics and complexity of markets and the scientification of production, with growing diversity of customer requests and with more varied products and processes, ever higher demands were placed on the flexibility of production structures (flexible quality production). This was countered by a pronounced division of labor - horizontally into simple, specialized tasks and vertically through the separation of planning and execution - with simple work tasks but complex organizational structures that froze in bureaucratic forms (large technical offices, many organizational interfaces, piecework bureaucracy). This led to extremely long throughput times (over 90% pure idle times), high inventories (dead capital), poor productivity and, above all, to unused work capacity (skills and experience) of elaborately trained skilled workers. At the same time, powerful microprocessors created the basis for standardized digital control technology and network protocols, which enabled a wide range of increasingly networked computer systems in production.

Against this background, Brödner developed alternative production forms of cell production ( production islands ), which allow the decoupled parallel production of entire families of parts and assemblies. These simplified organizational forms of increased productivity require complex work tasks that are mastered by qualified, self-organizing work groups whose work capacity is used and developed. They are supported in this by a large number of software tools. Research and pioneering companies in the late 1980s and 1990s took up, supplemented and further developed the central ideas of these forms of production, for example in the form of self-similar work structures in the fractal factory or holonic organizational structures in production.

In terms of flexibility and productivity, these production structures proved to be clearly superior to the efforts based on Tayloristic forms of organization to develop a comprehensive computer-integrated manufacturing CIM by means of extensive data and function integration of the computer systems used. Efforts to flexibly automate production processes using methods of symbolic artificial intelligence AI in the form of expert systems or knowledge-based systems did little to change this. Ultimately, they failed because of the difficulties involved in the explication of implicit knowledge .

Based on these findings, action research projects for the restructuring of companies were carried out at the Institute Work and Technology of the Science Center NRW in cooperation with companies and other institutes, with the aim of realizing holonic organizational structures with computer systems that support, not replace, qualified specialist work. Methodologically, this high performance or high road strategy is based on processes of evolutionary and participatory project management. Particular attention was paid to the qualification processes in order to enable skilled workers to design and organize work themselves, as well as to cope with psychological stress in these work structures. With a view to the growing qualified knowledge work, which is becoming more and more important in these flexible forms of production, Brödner also examined the dynamics of the emergence and interaction of implicit skills ( empirical knowledge ) with explicit, propositional specialist knowledge as well as the task-related cooperation of experts from different specialist areas and explored the essential conditions for success. Furthermore, representative surveys showed a massive impairment of productivity through outsourcing of manufacturing processes.

In the course of this research, difficulties in the development and use of complex computer systems with regard to usability and productivity became apparent. Based on experience and theoretical insights into the inherent self-referential nature of socio - technical design, business informatics in Siegen, with the practice- theoretical perspective of grounded design and evolutionary-participatory approaches, embarked on new ways of developing and appropriating computer systems. In addition, Brödner dealt critically with the current wave of connectionist and distributed artificial intelligence in the context of Industry 4.0 , big data and machine learning . Instead of relying on AI expectations, he advocates using the performance of new hardware for the productive interaction of competent experts with supporting, usable computer systems.

selected Writings

• Automation and workplace structures , Part I, communications from the Institute for Employment Research 1969 (8) 604–617 (with Friedrich Hamke), Part II, communications from the Institute for Employment Research 1970 (2), 137–172 (with Friedrich Hamke) (Part I PDF) (Part II PDF)
• The programmed head - a social history of data processing , Berlin: Wagenbach 1981 (with Detlef Krüger and Bernd Senf)
• Factory 2000. Alternative development paths into the future of the factory , Berlin: edition sigma 1985 (English edition: The Shape of Future Technology. The Anthropocentric Alternative , London: Springer 1990)
• In Search of the Computer Aided Craftsman , AI & Society 3 (1) 1989, 39-46
• Design of Work and Technology in Manufacturing , Int. J. of Human Factors in Manufacturing 1 (1) 1991, 1-16
• Success factors in the Japanese machine tool industry (with Wolfgang Schultetus), Eschborn: RKW 1992
• The outwitted Odysseus. On the broken relationship between people and machines , Berlin: edition sigma 1997
• Computer science in the world of work , Tübingen study texts Computer science and society, ed. by Sylvia Rizvi and Herbert Klaeren, University of Tübingen 1999
• A breath of fresh air in the factory. Rules of the game and models of change processes (ed. With Wolfgang Kötter), Berlin / Heidelberg: Springer 1999
• Recent Findings on Organizational Changes in German Industry (with Erich Latniak), Journal of Manufacturing Technology Management 15 (4) 2004, 360–368
• Operational rationalization strategies and use of technical systems , in: Bernhard Zimolong & Udo Konradt (eds.): Engineering psychology. Encyclopedia of Psychology: Economic, Organizational and Work Psychology - Volume 2, Göttingen: Hogrefe 2006, 943–980
• Introduction: Shaping Work and Technology , Chapter 3.8.1 in Felix Rauner & Rupert Maclean (Eds.): Handbook of Technical and Vocational Education and Training Research, Berlin Heidelberg: Springer 2008, 573-581
• The Misery of Digital Organizations and the Semiotic Nature of IT , AI & Society Journal of Human-Centered Systems 23 (2009), 331-351
• Sustainability in Knowledge-Based Companies , in: Peter Docherty; Mari Kira & Rami Shani (eds.): Creating Sustainable Work Systems. Developing social sustainability, London: Routledge 2009, 53–69
• Productivity Effects of Outsourcing: New Evidence on the Strategic Importance of Vertical Integration Decisions (with Steffen Kinkel & Gunter Lay), Int. Journal of Operations & Production Management 29 (2) 2009, 127–149
• Knowledge sharing and knowledge transformation , in: Manfred Moldaschl & Nico Stehr (eds.): Knowledge economy and innovation. Contributions to the economy of the knowledge society, Marburg: Metropolis 2010, 455–480 (PDF)
• Grounded Design - a Praxeological IS Research Perspective (with Markus Rohde; Gunnar Stevens; Mathias Betz & Volker Wulf), JIT 2016.5 AOP (PDF)
• Industry 4.0 and Big Data - really a new technology push? Revised and expanded contribution to the 2nd edition by Hartmut Hirsch-Kreinsen; Peter Ittermann & Jonathan Niehaus (eds.): Digitization of industrial work. The vision of Industry 4.0 and its social challenges, Baden-Baden: Nomos 2018, 323–346 (PDF)
• Limits and contradictions in the development and application of ›Autonomous Systems‹ , in: Hartmut Hirsch-Kreinsen & Anemari Karačić, A. (Ed.): Autonomous Systems and Work. Perspectives, challenges and limits of artificial intelligence in the world of work, Bielefeld: transcript 2019, pp. 69–97

literature

• Peter Brödner on the website of the University of Siegen

Web links

• Literature by and about Peter Brödner in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Hans Matthöfer : Humanization of work and productivity of the industrial society . Ed .: European Publishing Company. Cologne, S. 38 .
2. ↑ ^{a b c} Peter Brödner: Factory 2000. alternative development paths for the future of the factory . edition sigma, Berlin 1985.
3. ↑ Peter Brödner and Friedrich Hamke: Automation and workplace structures . In: Communications from the Institute for Employment Research . Part I: 1969 (8) pp. 604-617, Part II: 1970 (2), 137-172.
4. ↑ Peter Brödner: In Search of the Computer Aided Craftsman . In: AI & Society . 3 (1) 1989. pp. 39-46 .
5. ^ Hans-Jürgen Warnecke : The fractal factory: Revolution of corporate culture . Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg 1992.
6. ↑ John Mathews: Holonic Organizational Architectures . In: Human Systems Management . 15 (1) 1996, 27-54.
7. ↑ Peter Brödner & Wolfgang Schultetus: Success factors of the Japanese machine tool industry . RKW, Eschborn 1992.
8. ↑ Peter Brödner: The outwitted Odysseus. About the broken relationship between people and machines . edition sigma, Berlin 1997.
9. ↑ Peter Brödner & Wolfgang Kötter (eds.): Fresh wind in the factory. Rules of the game and models of change processes . Springer, Berlin / Heidelberg 1999.
10. ↑ Peter Brödner: Flexibility, workload and sustainable work design . In: Sustainable work design. Trend reports on the development and use of human resources . Hampp, Munich 2002, p. 489-541 .
11. ↑ Peter Brödner: Knowledge Sharing and Knowledge Transformation . In: Nico Stehr (ed.): Knowledge economy and innovation. Contributions to the economy of the knowledge society . Metropolis, Marburg 2010, p. 455-480 .
12. ↑ Peter Brödner, Steffen Kinkel & Gunter Lay: Productivity Effects of Outsourcing: New Evidence on the Importance of Strategic Decisions vertical integration . In: Int. Journal of Operations & Production Management . 29 (2) 2009, 127-149. 2009.
13. ↑ Mark Rohde, Peter Brödner, Gunnar Stevens, Mathias Betz & Volker Wulf: Grounded Design - a Praxeological IS Research Perspective .
14. ↑ Peter Brödner: Industry 4.0 and Big Data - really a new technological push ? Revised and expanded contribution to the 2nd edition of. In: H. Hirsch-Kreinsen, P. Ittermann & J. Niehaus (eds.): Digitization of industrial work. The vision of Industry 4.0 and its social challenges . Nomos, Baden-Baden 2018, p. 323-346 .