IT systems are too often used to monitor and punish rather than recognize and reward.
Michael Schrage worries about the impact of a trend he sees, where companies use their increasingly-electronic records to monitor their employees for bad behavior. In particular, he mentions expense report monitoring software that attempts to find obfuscated "extra" charges in order to catch and punish the wrong-doers.
His concern is not so much that these tools exist as it is with the reasoning behind implementing them. There are some bad employees, so we have to watch everyone and be prepared to punish them. On top of that he claims a decided lack of tools that provide positive feedback to employees or provide positive utility to people: software that turns expense reports around faster; tools that give access to all your benefits information; tools that make it easier to connect with colleagues who are working on similar projects.
One counter-comment argues that the job of IT is to implement what the business requires, not to subvert the business. Granted, but when the business consistently wants tools that damage morale, someone needs to step into the void.