Back in the days of the mainframe, computers were very expensive to operate and so were kept constantly busy. Processor time was precious, and this meant that a host of workers were employed preparing data for the computer in exactly the right format it needed to process it.

With the introduction of microcomputers such as the PC, computing power became much cheaper. So cheap, in fact, that it made more sense to have computers wait on their human operators instead of vice versa. So why do many businesses now seem perfectly happy to have staff spend their time staring at a screen, waiting for an application to update?

The growing popularity of web-based applications is chiefly to blame for this situation. Web-based software often seems much slower than a native client application would be, possibly because much of the processing is handled by a server that has to deal with requests coming from many other users simultaneously. Or it may be that many web-based applications have to fetch an entire new page whenever the user changes anything on the screen. Whatever the reason, workers are finding that Web 2.0 is rapidly turning into Wait 2.0.

There are some web-based applications that manage to be responsive; ­ Google Mail is a good example. In my experience, however, many web-based applications bring a forceful new meaning to the word “slow”. The content management system that underpins IT Week’s own web site is a case in point. When publishing an article, I have often found myself waiting several minutes just for the screen to refresh before being able to proceed to the next action.

It’s not difficult to understand why businesses are keen on web-based applications: they are relatively easy to implement, and because they are reached via a browser, they can be made cross-platform rather than running only on Windows PCs, for example. Access via a browser also makes for a zero deployment option - all you have to do is supply workers with a URL to the application, plus their login credentials.

Little thought, however, seems to have been given to the effect on productivity of implementing a key enterprise application this way. It surely can’t be cost-effective to have your staff twiddling their thumbs for much of the time, while they wait for a response back from the server? Perhaps this explains why so much employee time is said to be spent looking at social networking sites these days ­ - the workers are probably searching for something to keep them amused while waiting on some application.