Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
provided by the previous experience of people assigned to the task.”
66
The increasing inclusion of computer personnel as active participants in
all phases of software development, from design to implementation,
brought them into increasing contact—and confl ict—with other corpo-
rate employees.
The situation was complicated by the publication in 1958 of an article
in the
Harvard Business Review
titled “Management in the 1980s,” in
which Howard Leavitt and Thomas Whisler predicted a coming revolu-
tion in U.S. business management. Driven by the emergence of what they
called “information technology,” this revolution would radically reshape
the landscape of the modern corporation, completely reversing the recent
trend toward participative management, recentralizing power in the
hands of a few top executives, and utterly decimating the ranks of middle
management. And although “major resistance” could be expected during
the process of transforming “relatively autonomous and unprogrammed
middle-management jobs” into “highly routinized programs,” the bene-
fi ts offered to top-level executives meant that an information technology
revolution would be inevitable.
67
The central premise of Leavitt and Whisler's vision was that informa-
tion technology—which they described as a heterogeneous system com-
prised of the electronic computer, operations research techniques, and
sophisticated decision-support software—would largely eliminate the
need for autonomous middle managers. Jobs that had previously required
the discernment and experience of skilled managers would be replaced
by scientifi cally “programmed” systems and procedures. “Just as plan-
ning was taken from the hourly worker and given to the industrial engi-
neer,” so too would it be taken from the operational managers.
Information technology allowed “the top to control the middle just as
Taylorism allowed the middle to control the bottom.” The top would
increasingly include what Leavitt and Whisler called a “programmer
elite.” And although the
programmer
being referred to here was obvi-
ously a logistical or mathematical planner rather than a computer pro-
grammer, it was also clear that this new elite would be intimately familiar
with computer technology and software design.
68
Although “Management in the 1980s” is most generally cited for its
role in introducing the term information technology, it is best understood
in the context of a more general shift in management practices in the
decades after the Second World War. The war had produced a series of
“managerial sciences”—including operations research, game theory, and
systems analysis—all of which promised a more mathematical and tech-
