CHAPTER SEVEN

The Information Explosion

WHETHER AND WHEN THE “office of the future” will become reality, and what it will actually look like, are still largely conjecture. But the main impacts of the new mini-processor-based information technology are already predictable—and in some cases already with us.

The first impact will probably be a sharp drop in business travel. Few businessmen traveled before 1950 or so, and none, except salesmen, traveled a great deal. But as soon as the jet appeared, two decades ago, hopping a plane for a two-day meeting in Paris, Rio, or Tokyo became commonplace for senior executives and even more so for their immediate subordinates.

Whether this is the most effective way to get things done or get to know people is debatable. But the advantage of direct access, face to face, to associates, partners, and customers in faraway places so greatly outweighed the fatigue and cost of air travel as to encourage gross overindulgence in it.

Now increasingly there will be alternative ways to meet and “share a common experience.” No matter how far from each other, executives will more and more be able to “meet in the same room,” see each other eye to eye, talk to each other face to face, and exchange reports and graphs, all without physically leaving their own offices. Several satellites, now under construction and expected to begin operations within a few years, will transmit pictures, voices, and graphics simultaneously to earth stations that are linked with business subscribers—and thus be able to simulate the three-dimensional space of a real conference room in a subscriber’s office.

Executives will therefore have to think more carefully about what to use physical travel for; truly to know another person, for example, will probably always require a real, rather than a simulated, presence. But at the same time executives will have to learn what very few of them know so far: how to prepare, organize, run, and follow up a short meeting for both achievement and mutual understanding.

For the last twenty-five years or so, management scientists and computer specialists have been talking a great deal about total information systems. Now the hardware is available. A good many managers, especially in large companies, already have on their desks a mini-processor, which combines a small computer for their own use with a terminal for the company’s large computer system, complete with a small display screen and, frequently, with print-out for durable copy. Within a few years this will become standard equipment, like the telephone on the desk or the hand-held calculator—and the executive mini-processor may well be no larger than a telephone is today.

With the advent of the desk-top mini-processor, the manager risks being overloaded with paper and data. Indeed, the critical problem will not be how to get or how to process information, but rather to define what information really is. This is a task that cannot be left to that mythical creature, the “information specialist.” Information is the manager’s main tool, indeed the manager’s “capital,” and it is he who must decide what information he needs and how to use it.

Managers will also have to come to grips with some critical questions about the role of information in their organizations. Who shall have access to what information? How can information be protected against fraud, industrial espionage, or prying and gossip-mongering? How can personal privacy be guarded? How can confidential information be confined to those who are legitimately entitled to it, without a secretiveness which encourages scuttlebutt and demoralizes?

Over the last hundred years, armies have worked out useful rules to deal with these problems: A manager needs to know everything that pertains to his own work and to that of the level immediately above him. Information beyond this may be of interest to him, but has little relevance and should basically be restricted. Almost no one, outside of the military, has tried to convert this rule into policy so far; even the military still has a long way to go. Yet without such a policy the new information capacity can only endanger both performance and organization morale.

The greatest impact of the new information technology, however, will not be on the human organization but on the production process. Mini-processors are beginning to regulate the operation of machines and tools, a process that is already far advanced in numerically controlled machine tools, medical instruments, all kinds of testing equipment, and increasingly in aircraft and automobile engines.

This integration of information processing with productive machinery amounts to a third industrial revolution. The second one began roughly a century ago, when machines were first combined directly with fractional horsepower motors. Until then, power—whether produced by water, steam engine, or dynamo—had to be transmitted to machines by belts or pulleys, which in turn meant that power-driven equipment had to be very close to the source of power. A few hundred yards was the limit of distance.

The fractional horsepower motor made possible the central power station. It made possible the modern factory. It gave both flexibility and economy. By 1920 or so, the transmission belt had become obsolete and modern industrial production had emerged. Ten years later the fractional horsepower motor had taken over the oldest domestic appliance around, the sewing machine. And by 1950 it had been integrated with the typewriter, the toothbrush, and the carving knife. The fractional horsepower motor, in effect, took heavy manual work out of the productive process.

The third industrial revolution, in which information processing is becoming part of the machine or the tool, will shift production from being manual to being knowledge-based. Before the second industrial revolution there were journeymen and laborers. Afterward, the greatest expansion was in the number of semiskilled machinetenders and, more important, skilled workers. Within the next twenty years the center of gravity is likely to shift to tech nologists—people whose contributions are based more on formal schooling and theory than on apprenticeship and skill.

There is a good deal of talk today about the need to re-industrialize America, to restore the country’s capacity to manufacture capital goods productively and competitively. To do this, however, will require a shift to the third industrial revolution—that is, to the integration of information processing and production in machines and tools.

Only such integration can make productive the one resource where this country and indeed all industrially developed countries have an advantage, namely, highly schooled people. From now on, in all developed countries, there will be an increasing shortage of young people available for traditional manual work, skilled or unskilled. Tremendously large populations in the developing countries will be available for traditional manual work, and will be willing, or forced, to work for very low wages, even as they rapidly improve their productivity. In such a world, only the integration of information processing and production can maintain and improve the standards of living for workers in the already developed countries.

The mini-processor will thus provide tremendous opportunities for the industrial economies. But it will also impose tremendous demands on businessmen and on the economy—demands on capital equipment, demands on substantial shifts in productive organization, and, above all, demands on the management of people at work.

(1980)