Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
nologically oriented approach to business management. As Philip
Mirowski and others have suggested, these nascent “cyborg” sciences
were deeply connected to the emerging technology of electronic comput-
ing.
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Not only did many of these new techniques require a signifi cant
amount of computing power in and of themselves but they relied on the
electronic computer as a central metaphor for understanding the nature
of the modern bureaucratic organization.
70
Many of the most visionary
proposals for the use of the electronic computer in management fre-
quently rode into the corporation on the back of this new breed of expert
consultants.
Foremost among these new computer radicals was Herbert Simon,
who in 1949 helped found the Carnegie-Mellon University's Graduate
School of Industrial Administration (and who in 1978 was awarded a
Nobel Prize for his work on the economics of rational decision making).
In his topic
The New Science of Management
in 1960, Simon outlined
his version of a machine-aided system of organizational management.
An early pioneer in the fi eld of artifi cial intelligence, Simon had no
doubts about the ability of the electronic computer to transform organi-
zations; as a result of advances in decision-support software, Simon
argued, technologically sophisticated fi rms were “acquiring the technical
capacity to replace humans with computers in a rapidly widening range
of 'thinking' and 'deciding' tasks.” Within twenty-fi ve years, he pre-
dicted, fi rms will “have the technical capability of substituting machines
for any and all human functions in organizations.” Interestingly enough,
Simon did not believe that this radical new use of the computer would
lead to the creation of a computing elite but rather that improvements
in artifi cial intelligence would lead to the elimination of the computer
specialist altogether.
71
The idea that “thinking machines” would soon replace expert com-
puter programmers was not widely shared outside the artifi cial intelli-
gence community, however. More common was the notion that the need
for such decision makers could be made redundant by the development
of an integrated management system that would feed information directly
to high-level executives, bypassing middle managers completely. John
Diebold described one version of such a system in an article in the
Harvard Business Review
in 1964. When Diebold had introduced the
concept of “automation” more than a decade earlier, he had confi ned
the use of automatic control systems to traditional manufacturing and
production processes. But his article proposed a “bolder, more innova-
tive” approach to automatic data processing (ADP) that blurred the
