If information was 1 in 1978, according to one estimate, it was 600 by 1986 and 1000 in 1993: on that basis 2000 by 2000 is certain. The accuracy of these figures is not the issue. Everyone is painfully conscious of a rising flood of information in which it is only too easy for managers to drown. To us, the speaking symbol of this threat is the printout spewing data in the corridor of a US car company - and feeding it straight into a shredder.
That was the easiest way for the division to handle unwanted information which head offfice insisted on sending. Those divisional executives are by no means alone in their feelings of helplessness before the unwanted, unsought tide. Nearly half of 1,300 managers surveyed in the US, UK, Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong felt themselves unable to handle the masses of data that descended upon them.
The survey, conducted by Benchmark Research for Reuters Business Information, reported several other alarming facts. It found that 31% of the surveyed managers received unsolicited information; 38% wasted substantial time trying to find the information they actually did want; 47% said that gathering information took their attention off their main responsibilities; half of them took work home or stayed late at the office to make up for the time lost in the information jungle.
Sadly enough, 61% told the researchers that information overload had affected their personal relationships. Yet these alarming statistics, as reported in Next by Ira Matathia and Marian Salzman, do not cover the most important question by far. Were these managers getting the information they actually needed? It is worth sorting through a great deal of mud to find nuggets of pure gold.
Better by far, managers who only recently seemed to be stuck (if not drowning) in the mud can now move powerfully forward by controlling the flow and storage of data to meet their prime objectives. The storage alone has become a massively growing industry. According to International Data Corporation, in the four years to 1998 the demand from corporations for data storage grew at over 80% annually. That rate is even accelerating: IDC thinks that it will double annually into the future.
By 2001 the market could easily be worth $35 billion. Fortunately for the customers, the price per bit of information stored is falling - though not as fast as the storage need is rising. Dataquest figures put the price decline at 35% per annum. Despite this fall in prices, the dominant position of a Massachusetts storage company, EMC, has given it a soaring share price (210% in 1998 alone) to match its booming sales, which have passed $4 billion. The capabilities of storage units like EMC's, which combine hardware and software, are essential peripherals to any corporate system.
There are plenty of other storage devices: disk drives, tape libraries that back up stored data, even technology that allows users on a network to get straight into the storage without going through a server (the company making this wonder got valued by the stock market at a mind-boggling $3.3 billion, or 15 times its sales). Without adequate storage, easily accessible, the Information Revolution cannot proceed. That is the base requirement on which other vital solutions can be imposed.
What are these solutions? A number were highlighted by Sara Kiesler in an important article in the Harvard Business Review Here are some of them:
1. How do you prevent the generation and exchange of more and more information that is less and less useful?
2. Who decides what information gets collected and distributed to whom?
3. What criteria should govern the selection of distributed information?
4. How do you maintain the correct balance between internal and external information?
5. Who has access to what corporate data?
6. Who controls the use of the network - and why?
7. How can you ensure that electronic messages are not only sent, not only received, but acted on?
8. If the answers involve several people, how are their decisions and actions to be co-ordinated?
9. Is it OK to circulate messages devoid of business content that nevertheless bring people together in an 'electronic community'?
10. How far can you use the network, instead of face-to-face discussion, in making important decisions?
None of the questions is easy to answer, and it's tempting to fall back on trust. Once you have computers on the desk-tops, as you must have, for information access alone, then networking, IP technology and other facilities are manifestly both logical and economic. Once you are connected, the ten tough questions will, somehow or other, answer themselves. Kiesler sums up this loose, if comforting conclusion in these words:
'In the computerised organisation, most people will have information that always existed and some people will have new information. Computer networks will change existing groups and will create new, electronic groups. People will relate to one another in different ways, and the dynamics of decision-making may change'.
Her plea for a 'light-handed policing policy' suggests letting nature take its course as far as possible. Undue constraints will only limit the potential of systems which, in any case, will make up some, maybe many, of its rules as they go along.
DELEGATING AND SHARING
But the fundamental issue behind all ten questions is delegation, or sharing. Delegators are sharers. They give some of their authority, their work, to somebody else, without altogether relinquishing property rights. They can, for example, grab back the delegated work. They may be held responsible for its quality and achievement, anyway, by those above. Traditionally, proliferation of information has been curbed (but also often created) by top-down methods. Paperwork bonfires are always initiated from above, often in face of extreme opposition lower down.
That's because the files and the reports symbolise the delegated powers. Remove them, and even if the symbols have become wholly symbolic (i.e., useless) the possessor feels weakened, emasculated. The idea of management work cascading down from the top is intrinsic to the whole concept of hierarchy. But the management of computer systems themselves raises more immediate issues. They are not problems with which senior management has been much concerned in the past. Like the organisation and control of the despatch system, those of the information system really have been delegated.
The role and importance of the chief delegate, the 'manager of information systems', or some similar title, inevitably rose in stature as information moved to stage centre. But now the drama is unfolding in a different way. 'Decentralised computing is sweeping business like a wave rolling onto a beach', wrote John J. Donovan in the Harvard Business Review , as long ago as 1988. Economic considerations were among the factors that made the advance as unstoppable as that wave. At that year's relative prices, the average cost per mip (millions of instructions per second) on a mainframe came down by 98% on a PC.
The organisational potential of the new, amazingly cheaper technology only intensifies the pressures for change: Donovan, an associate professor at MIT's Sloan School of Management, identified centripetal forces within organisations themselves. 'Employees want to operate their own systems, in their own way, and when it's convenient for them'. This fundamentally healthy desire has permanently changed management.
The migration of computing power from corporate headquarters to divisions, plants and desktops has not reduced costs and enhanced competitiveness, but offers to renew organisational creativity. These three aims are the agents of the Triple Revolution. The answers to the ten questions posed here will have to come from the bottom up, almost by definition. But this process must be disciplined. The disciplinarian is the network, without which, to quote Donovan again, you would 'wind up with hundreds of isolated applications...unable to share data'.
You certainly don't want that. Equally, you don't want, while suppressing too much non-conformity, to crush the very vitality and personal system ownership that are the essence of the revolution. This poses a major threat to the information systems manager, known in the US as the chief information officer. Unless these people convert themselves from overlords of vast hardware and software investments and budgets, and concentrate instead on networks, the Net and getting practical business results, their companies cannot ride the revolution.
The culture shock for IT professionals mimics that for the whole bureaucratic, hierarchical organisation framework. Like other senior managers, the top IT executive has to make surrender after surrender. Authority over hardware and software purchases is the first thing to go, but its loss is only part of a much wider surrender: sacrificing order for chaos. When anybody and everybody can buy programs and machines within their own budgets (or possibly download the programs free) anarchy has replaced the old absolute control.
THE 'BIG BROTHER' MODE
In what Donovan describes as the 'Big Brother' mode: 'Large main-frames available only to data-processing professionals run programs designed and written by centralised software teams...this set of policies is an organisational and technological dinosaur'. That's an exact description of the corporations the IT brontosaurus was designed to serve. This beast has evolved. But the next stage, with the hardware distributed, the users setting priorities, and the central experts doing all the technical work, is simply not responsive enough.
Try to maintain absolute control as the organisation moves towards controlled chaos, and you get nowhere. Probably the most natural course for companies that haven't fully understood the new imperatives is the 'watchdog' phase. You let people get on with their own computing, but keep ultimate control in the centre by establishing an overriding authority. That supervises standard operating systems and programming language, and the operation of 'frequent and rigorous audits'.
That's no good, either, according to Donovan. It generates 'the most severe built-in tensions' of any model he's studied 'and is therefore the least stable' - and you can certainly see why. Only an organisation belonging to the clan of 'large inflexible bureaucracies with clear lines of authority and hierarchy' could even attempt to live within this system. It has no place in a world which is moving, because move it must, from bureaucracy to entrepreneurial college, from inflexibility to suppleness, from clear lines of authority to a criss-cross grid of relationships, from vertical hierarchy to the horizontal authority of expertise.
The problem of exercising control of everyday computing is best and most neatly resolved by abandoning the attempt. Control rests with use: users have responsibility for what they use. That still leaves the IT professionals with a tricky and important set of problems. The revolution requires perfect connection all the way up from hand-held devices to the mainframe (if any). Each machine must have perfect individual, physical connectivity. Throughout the network all systems must connect perfectly. And there must be perfect connection between all applications running on any of these systems.
It used to be nigh-impossible to construct the perfect set-up, where every piece of hardware and software fitted perfectly together, with the same operating systems, data storage and exchange, and mainframe-to-mini-to-workstation-to-laptop connections. Nearly all companies had their work cut out to turn the Tower of Babel into an intelligible, universal language. IP technology, though, brings the near-impossible into day-to-day reality. True compatibility has arrived.
The evolution of open, multi-vendor standards opened the door, and the World Wide Web threw it wide. You can get a best-of-breed solution from a single pverall supplier who combines the best of each piece of hardware and software, irrespective of its manufacturer. In this climate, how it's done is less important than getting it done. The IT professionals have to ensure the robustness of the infrastructure to minimise interruptions and downtime and maximise speed. The users, though, will take all that for granted. The utility of communications will be like the supply of electricity, water or gas: on tap, all the time.
The technicalities of this work - the modems, multiplexers, local and wide area networks, browsers, routers, servers and so on - are of no interest to users. They want a consistent, easy-to-use interface between the network's components; they want to safeguard its secrets; they want to use new applications anywhere on the system: they want anything that's part of the system to work with anything else. Above all, they want to freely exchange information with all other users.
RELATIONSHIP MARKETING
They want all this for important purposes, like 'relationship marketing'. The idea is to build a total relationship with individual customers, even within a hugge client base, like that of a bank. The commercial prizes in establishing such a relationship are great. But bankers, to take that example, have been stymied by their inability to analyse, evaluate and change the client's whole financial portfolio. That demands mobilising information from the systems - usually several, separate and complex - that control respectively the customer's mortgage, fixed interest investments, current accounts and loans.
The technology already exists to run the relationship in this way, generating large revenues for the bank in the process, and welding the customer seamlessly to the supplier. Relationship marketing is communication. The thrust of the revolution is for communication to take over as the central function of the electronic network. Sheer processing performance, the god in the temple for most of the computer age, has been toppled from its pedestal. Managing the intercommunications has taken over as the means of control and direction, while managing the hardware and software united by the network will rest with the user.
Relationship marketers will no more be aware of the electronic conduits that assemble their customer's data than they are of the air traffic network that guides the plane safely to its destination. They will only care about getting there. And they will arrive, together with all other marketers who see that the customer, and not the product or service, is the true asset of the business.
The responsibility for getting the information, however, belongs to the line manager. Understanding complex, and even simple issues requires reliable, timely information. That in turn demands being proactive, not reactive users, people who manage information, rather than being managed by it. The essential equipment of modern managers includes knowing what information they need, how they want it, where they want it, and when.
The essential, matching task of the information manager is to meet these internal 'customers' more than halfway, in the interests of an over-riding purpose. In an age of complex competition, the system must provide knowledge easily, and make the hard task of turning it into action easier as well. Without doubt, the new technology fits that bill: the doubt and difficulty arise only from management's uncertainty in face of its powers. Abolish those negative emotions, and the positive benefits of the Revolution will flow through thick and fast.
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