COLUMN ONE : Memo Pads Give Way to Modems : Technology is changing the way secretaries do business. Those who master the machines can gain power. But others find opportunities in the steno pool are drying up.

SAN FRANCISCO —  Dictation? Toss out those steno pads, forget that shorthand. These days, bosses can write their own letters on their own personal computers.

Need to schedule a meeting for 50 staffers? Let a PIM (personal information manager) in your computer scope out everyone’s calendar, send E-mail invitations and record the RSVPs.

Add another figure to the list of endangered species: the traditional office secretary.

Their ranks thinned by recession and their lives made easier by a spreading intolerance of sexism, some secretaries are being propelled by technology into new--and often bigger--jobs.

Once relegated to wrestling with tab keys and carbon paper, pounding out endless drafts of documents, answering phones, fetching coffee and doing personal favors for the boss, the general-purpose secretary has largely gone the way of Underwood typewriters and mimeograph machines.

Instead, a super-group of “administrative assistants” has emerged from social change and the rubble of downsizing. And they have benefited from a double bounty born of technology: personal computers, voice mail and a flood of other devices have not merely relieved them of drudgery but actually empowered them.

Their command of such machinery allows them to focus on higher-level projects and makes them invaluable to technology-illiterate bosses.

But just as these super aides testify to the opportunities created, they represent only the shiny side of the technology coin. On the reverse, along with millions of blue-collar workers, are all the secretaries who could not adapt or were no longer needed--and those who would have followed. The higher skill requirements and narrowed opportunities have limited a traditional job choice for high school graduates, especially women.

Now, in thousands of offices across the country, secretaries work for three times as many bosses as in the past. Pools have replaced personal secretaries. And some companies are doing without them altogether.

Indeed, although the U.S. work force grew by 14% in the last decade, the number of secretaries, stenographers and typists tumbled nearly 13%, to about 3.4 million, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“I would say the traditional secretary is on her way out,” said Maripat Blankenheim, a spokeswoman for 9 to 5, the National Assn. of Working Women. “You don’t see Miss Gordon trotting into an office with her steno pad taking a letter. Those days are gone.”

Consider:

* Ten years ago, senior partners at Jackson, Lewis, Schnitzler & Krupman, a Los Angeles law firm, might have had two secretaries each. Now there is one secretary for every two or three lawyers. Nearly all the lawyers have PCs and 20% have laptops.

* AT & T’s managing director of personal communications uses an Eo personal communicator to send and receive electronic mail and faxes when she travels, which is most of the time. “The only thing for my secretary is to put through my expenses,” said Harriet Donnelly, hastening to add: “My secretary is happier because she does higher-level projects.”

* 3-Day Blinds, a mini-blind retailer, has 400 employees at its Anaheim headquarters, none of them secretaries. Executives do their correspondence on computers. “If we need a manual, we hire a temp to do the word-processing,” said Helen Broders, employment recruiter.

Nationwide, “the organization is surviving with fewer secretaries, and to some extent they’re becoming more specialized,” said Heidi I. Hartmann, director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington think tank.

Early in her three-decade career, legal secretary Johanna Cancro would take dictation from lawyers in a back-and-forth ritual of typing, correcting and retyping. She would also take their shoes to the repair shop and order flowers for their wives on Valentine’s Day.

Technology helped change all that.

Two years ago, her boss got computer religion, and now he writes affidavits, keeps track of appointments and reads E-mail on the desktop computer in his downtown San Francisco office, the laptop at his Russian Hill home and the personal computer at his weekend place in the Sierra Nevada foothills. That has freed up Cancro, 53, for better things.

“I think now my job is becoming more of an administrator,” she said. Last year, the law firm sent her to a managerial workshop, an opportunity she says would not have been available years ago.

At first, she acknowledges, all the new technology being thrown at her was “a little confusing, intimidating and scary.” Then things suddenly “opened up.”

A younger colleague, Denise Anzelone, 43, notes that a new generation of computer-literate law associates fresh out of school has lightened secretaries’ word-processing load considerably. She has more time for photocopying, filing, expense reports--and computer programming. She also finds herself hustling to keep up with the changes in office software.

“I just can’t learn enough,” Anzelone said. “I want to stay ahead, not just for job security but to know something more than others and gain a competitive edge.”

Before aspiring office assistants go job-prospecting these days, they must master an array of database, word-processing and even spreadsheet software. College degrees are becoming the norm. With jobs scarce, companies can afford to be choosy.

The deep recession that drove corporations to pare executive ranks also cost many secretaries their jobs. But some companies, recognizing that secretaries were a relative bargain, hung on to them, moving them into tasks once reserved for higher-ups. Using powerful new software, secretaries coordinate projects and churn out documents with snazzy pie charts.

Those who did not feel threatened by the technology have become workplace linchpins and information gatekeepers, blurring the once distinct line between them and managers.

Meanwhile, a wide array of technologies are changing the way desk-bound types--not only secretaries--do business.

Cheap software can automate budgets and bill paying, design splashy brochures, make travel arrangements, provide letters and forms ready for customizing, create 3-D blueprints and tell how to write a will or treat a fever.

The newest wrinkle: Computer programs that act like “intelligent agents,” performing complex jobs and even making decisions in the background without human intervention. Personal-computer agents can be set up to send flowers to a customer whose orders reach a certain level, automatically distribute monthly sales reports as electronic mail or nag subordinates who haven’t completed a necessary task.

Networking software that enables entire departments or companies to communicate seamlessly cuts down on the need for secretaries to organize meetings.

And receptionists?

Voice mail has made their phone duties practically obsolete--if at a lamentable loss of that human touch. Meanwhile, promising new voice-activated computers are making managers even more self-sufficient.

“If technology does its job properly, it should be displacing workers,” said Mark A. Macgillivray, a Silicon Valley consultant.

At his firm, H & M Consulting in Sunnyvale, computers keep track of billable hours, eliminating the need for most clerical help. Tax-preparation software has slashed his annual bill at filing time to $300 from $1,500.

“I don’t have to use an accountant at all,” he said. “The only reason I keep him is to have his signature on the form. He used to work at the IRS.”

Macgillivray suspects that as offices become more automated, companies will simply discover that they can forgo hiring support staff.

“There is great software out there. You don’t need these people,” he said. “Any executive out there who has to have an executive assistant is a lazy toad.”

High-tech companies are understandably reluctant to portray their products as pushing secretaries toward the exit. Rather, they focus on how products are wiping out drudgery.

“(Secretaries) are really pivotal to what goes on in executive offices,” said Barbara Baird, a marketing director for Lotus Development Corp.’s Organizer software program. “We have no interest in eliminating them.”

Lotus Organizer, an entry in the hot market for so-called PIMs, or personal information management programs, began shipping in September, 1992. Lotus recently combined that software with its existing Notes program to allow users to schedule group meetings. The software scans individuals’ calendars to see when they are available, then notifies them via E-mail of the proposed meeting time and location. Those invited can respond electronically.

That saves a secretary--or an executive--the fuss and frustration of calling everybody and trying to schedule around conflicts.

At Lotus, based in Cambridge, Mass., the term secretary has been axed in favor of administrative assistant. Cliff Conneighton, marketing director for Lotus Notes, said the technology enables him to do his own typing and filing electronically, so that his assistant can help gather information for presentations.

“It’s much, much faster for me to sit down and type a three-line memo to my boss electronically than to call in an assistant, dictate and check the results,” he said.

Anne Long, personnel administrator at a marketing services company in San Bernardino County, agrees that “computer technology speeds everything up” and that clerical work is “kind of going away.”

As a result, she manages to be executive secretary for the company’s chief financial officer, its vice president of international operations and its merchandising manager, on top of running the personnel department.

She sees a downside: With instantaneous communication, offices operate at a relentless pace. “Everything can be faxed, and you end up responding immediately,” she said. “It absolutely keeps us in the rat race. There’s no slowing down.”

Of course, many secretaries dispute the notion that technology could put them out of business. Michele Allen, a senior legal secretary for three attorneys at Jackson, Lewis, Schnitzler & Krupman, says she is busier today than she was nine years ago.

“We get this new fax machine that can feed things in (automatically),” she said. “While it’s saving time, nobody is less busy. There’s more to do. Everything is very accelerated.”

Technology enhances what she does, she says, but perhaps her most important expertise is organizational skill. “A machine cannot trouble-shoot,” she said.

Despite its noble pedigree--the Latin a secretis and secretarius referred to scribes, inevitably male, or others entrusted with secret matters--the word secretary some years back took on a stigma of lowliness. Bosses would protest that “this office would fall apart without her,” but the fact remained that secretaries got notoriously little respect--with compensation to match.

Technology, a tough economy and societal shifts are altering those views. Women have entered the work force in droves, and some who in times past might have been secretaries are instead bosses, with perhaps a greater empathy for support staff.

Men accustomed to cooking and changing diapers have adapted to using a keyboard and, if they have working wives and raised consciousness, are less likely to treat secretaries as gofers. Although typing was regarded for years in offices as woman’s work, agility with a keyboard these days carries a certain cachet.

Meanwhile, the very term secretary rankles some young people entering the work force armed with a wide array of technical skills.

“At my office, if you call anybody at a word-processing machine a secretary, you’re fired; it’s verboten ,” said Larry Hirschhorn, a management consultant in Philadelphia, who has studied the effects of technology on secretaries.

The group 9 to 5 says that although employers expect secretaries to be able to handle spreadsheets, WordPerfect and Windows, paychecks do not always reflect the additional qualifications. The average weekly salary for clericals in 1991, the organization’s most recent data, was $357. (Fewer than 2% of secretaries are men, but their average weekly pay is $459, versus $348 for women.)

“Wages have not increased at the same rate as knowledge,” Blankenheim said.

Even as office automation becomes more prevalent, many executives still see a role for secretaries--or assistants, or associates, whatever they might be called.

Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, where Cancro works, “won’t be putting legal secretaries on the street,” said her boss, Robert Daggett. “It’s just that women who used to spend 7 1/2 hours a day grunting and groping with margin releases now are doing work fit for human consumption.”

Daggett, 63, acknowledges that “I was one of these guys who said, ‘I think and talk and she types.’ Now I do my own work on the computer and give it to Miss Cancro to make it pretty enough to go outside.”

Cancro says one big positive of the more automated workplace is having “more knowledge about what’s going on, instead of being a machine typing what you see.”

But the job still entails “plenty of grunt work,” she says. And some traditions, she added, die hard: “He still expects a cup of coffee in the morning and afternoon.”