Tea Shop Pioneered Computer-Enhanced Productivity

Yes, it's true. When I first fell into the business world of computing, one company had mythical status.

For the first (anywhere?) such machine that actually ran a business was made not by a computer company. Although apparently sparked by a trip from England that saw some of the early mainframes in America in the late 40s. With 250 cafes across the country, Lyons Tea Rooms made theirs in-house. Named Leo.

Lyons Electronic Office got built in 1951. Also inspired by Cambridge Uni's development of Edsac (the Electronic Delay Storage Automatic Calculator).

Shortly after, Frank Land was sent on a crash course to learn how to program it. He died last month, age 97.

He'd become a revered figure. Responsible, as his Times obit notes, "for automation of tea purchasing, keeping account of the company's thousands of tea chests, its distribution and sales". Knowing he was treading brand new ground.

He later was in charge of liaising with all the huge blue-chip names wishing to buy time on his machines. Eventually when spun out, helping to sell them by custom-designing programs for clients.

Later joining the London School of Economics as the nascent field of information systems grew into academic study.

That obit also included a metric;

"Calculating employees' pay had taken an experienced clerk eight minutes per employee. Leo did the job in one and a half seconds, a big saving for a company with 30,000 people".

As they say, do the maths.

As quantified testimonials go, it is indeed striking.

The precise grammar of a metric isn't quite followed. But the point still lands.

The improvement is massive. The new way taking, per employee, just a third of one percent of the time before. That's tricky to visualise. Which is what a fully framed metric allows.

For instance, it's a 320x productivity leap. One person could now theoretically handle the payroll of over 300 people in the time it used to take for one. Pop an actual hard-nosed (currency) amount after that and that's but one way you're there.

But in this tale, you suspect it as the first modern-day case with decimation of a fleet of pen-pushers.

No-one buys efficiency, the ol' wisdom goes.

Yet back then people were very much buying more time and money. From faster task completion to freeing up finite resource for deployment elsewhere.

Good to note when we drop in our own metrics.

And where we've something of the order of a practical elimination of something or other from our solution, you can now add a bit of colour by evoking this first ever example.

One your competition would never cite and your prospect will surely remember.