Managing in a Time of Great Change

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Information Executives Need Today

EVER SINCE THE NEW data-processing tools first emerged thirty or forty years ago, businesspeople have both overrated and underrated the importance of information in the organization. We—and I include myself—overrated the possibilities to the point where we talked of computer-generated “business models that could make decisions and might even be able to run much of the business.” But we also grossly underrated the new tools; we saw in them the means to do better what executives were already doing to manage their organizations.

Nobody talks of business models making economic decisions anymore. The greatest contribution of our data-processing capacity so far has not even been to management. It ...