TEL 355: Communication and Information Systems in Organizations

1
TEL 355 Communication and Information Systems in
Organizations

• Conceptualizing Information Technology as
  Organization
• and Vice Versa
• Professor John F. Clark

2
Is This Sheer Idiocy?

• James Beniger, noted authority, says
• Personal computing a fad approaching a craze?!?
• Keeping track of oil tankers with 3x5 cards?
• Would you want to keep track of your oil tanker
  by reading a weekly trade paper?
• Ever hear of the Exxon Valdez?

3
Why Do We Need Computers?

• For controlling large numbers of high-speed
  objects or rapidly changing variables in real
  time in a highly uncertain environment.
• Beniger admits that we need computers for space
  travel and air traffic control.
• However, he says, we dont really need it for
  airline reservations or centralized traffic
  control (only two dimensions?).

4
Computers and Organizations

• Theory is important to the practical
  understanding of information technologies in
  organizations.
• Large-scale formal organization and computers
  have much the same practical functions in many
  applications.
• Understanding of organizations can be informed by
  theories about information that is normally
  associated with computers.

5
Formal Organization

• Historically, has emerged onlyas tasks involving
  information processing, communnication, and
  control exceeded the capabilities of the unaided
  human brain.
• Ultimately derives its capabilities from the
  human brain and cannot transcend their collective
  limitations and the constraints of their
  interconnectedness.

6
Formal Organization

• First emerged about 3000 B.C. in Egypt and
  Mesopotamia later in Rome, China and Byzantium.
• Criteria collective activities needed to be
  coordinated by two or more brains toward explicit
  and impersonal goals CONTROL.
• Only when speed is accompanied by sufficient
  volume of movements or flows do organizational
  capabilities exceed the brain.

7
Industrialization and Organization

• The 19th century brought changes in energy
  technology that resulted in the need for formal
  organization in the modern sense.
• Over a fifty-year period from 1830 to 1880 a
  revolution took place in government, technology,
  and marketing.
• The result was what we call bureaucracy.

8
Technology and Control

• Before industrialization, processes and flows
  were driven by wind, water, animal, and human
  muscle.
• Speed was the key nothing moved fast enough to
  be beyond the ability of a single brain to
  control.
• Industrialization created both the need and the
  possibility of technological control.

9
First Modern Organizations

• Railroads are the prototype for technological
  control
• After an early train wreck, Western Railroad
  reorganized its operations into a data
  processing, communication, and control system
  that was the prototype of a computer.
• Human brains were used for storing and processing
  distributed information.

10
Rationalization and Organization

• Control can be increased not only by increasing
  the capability to process information but also by
  decreasing the amount of information to be
  processed.
• Today, computer and network specialists call this
  preprocessing.
• Paradoxically, this the destruction or ignoring
  of information to facilitate processing.

11
Control Through Preprocessing

• Time zones not just sun time anymore.
• Standardized grading how do you like your eggs?
• Fixed prices eliminated the art of the deal
• Trademarks help products sell themselves and
  reduce information complexity are sometimes
  worth more than the company itself.