Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
expertise that increasingly brought programmers into confl ict with other
white-collar employees.
The fi rst glimpse of this potential can be seen in a Price Waterhouse
report from 1959 called
Business Experience with Electronic Computers
.
The report was the fi rst book-length, comprehensive, publicly available
study of corporate computing efforts, and appears to have been made
widely available. In it, a group of Price Waterhouse consultants con-
cludes that the secret to success in computing was the availability of
high-quality programming, and confi rmed the conventional wisdom that
“high quality individuals” were the “key to top grade programming.”
Why? Because “to 'teach' the equipment, as is amply evident from expe-
rience to date, requires considerable skill, ingenuity, perseverance, orga-
nizing ability, etc. The human element is crucial in programming.” In
emphasizing the “considerable skill, ingenuity, perseverance, [and] orga-
nizing ability” required of programmers, the study deliberately confl ated
the roles of programmer and analyst. In fact, its authors suggested, “the
term 'programmer' . . . is unfortunate since it seems to indicate that the
work is largely machine oriented when this is not at all the case.
. . . [T]raining in systems analysis and design is as important to a pro-
grammer as training in machine coding techniques; it may well become
increasingly important as systems get more complex and coding becomes
more automatic.” Perhaps even more signifi cantly, the study blurred the
boundary between business experience and technical expertise. If any-
thing, it privileged the technical, since “a knowledge of business opera-
tions can usually be obtained by an adequate expenditure of time and
effort,” whereas “innate ability . . . seems to have a great deal to do with
a man's capacity to perform effectively in . . . systems design.”
65
Management, Information, and Systems
As software projects expanded in scope to encompass not only tradi-
tional data processing applications (payroll, for example) but also man-
agement and control, computer personnel began to encroach on the
domains of operational managers. The changing role of the computer in
corporate management and the rising power of EDP professionals did
not go unnoticed by other midlevel managers. As early as 1959, observ-
ers were noting a sense of “disenchantment” on the part of many manag-
ers. Overambitious computerization efforts had “placed stresses on
established organizational relationships,” and demanded skills “not
