Martin Banks, Personal Computer World 08/86 - checked

August 1986

Once upon a time I had the occasion to telephone an individual working in a large corporation. I wanted to ask about silly things, such as management information systems.

Now, you all know what they are, don't you? They are the things which make working life an absolute breeze. Just look at all the adverts for any computer or applications package that is aimed at anything remotely `business'. It will be roughly along the lines of `buy this XYZ and all your management problems will disappear'.

As if by some miracle, said XYZ will bring forth everything you ever thought you ever might need to know, regardless of whether you need it or are even in a real management position in a company, and make your life wonderful. Everything becomes so easy, and so damned RIGHT, that you will win lots of brownie points and be off down to the golf club with the MD discussing that special directorship and saffron-coloured BMW you've always had you eye on.

So, I rang this chap at the large corporation who I had been told was a real whiz at management information systems. He was, after all, a genuine user of such stuff and had been responsible for installing an extremely large one (management information system, that is).

"Go on", says I, using my best interview technique, "tell us all about it then, this management information system stuff?"

And he did, which to say in a more accurate form, he didn't. What he said was that he and his company had, like many others before them, fallen into a most obvious trap. They had, like others, actually taken the advertisements at face value.

This meant that he had gone off and ordered a large and complex management information system, based around networked personal computers and large file servers and stuff like that. Lots of fancy information management software was purchased and installed. The redundancy notices for thousands of boring clerical workers were made out, ready for distribution (this last is a little bit of artistic licence on my part, just to build up dramatic tension. Things were, however, moving rapidly that way).

Everything was, therefore, going to plan, or at least the outline of a plan as established by the advertisements. The systems were installed on manager's desks, the software was installed and run, everything was ready. Everybody worthy of the name manager in the corporation got a machine on their desk and, by definition, access to all that lovely management information. They all sat their with fingers poised over their RETURN keys waiting for the big off. Soon, they would be able to get any cut they wanted from all sorts of lovely information about the corporation. The excitement was intense.

The big moment came and they started hitting those keys. "Given the average rise in car prices over the last three years," keyed in an eager managing director, "what growth rate is needed in our own gross margins to keep me in new Rolls Royces?" It seemed a fair question, I suppose. Back came the answer, or to state things more accurately, back didn't come the answer.

"Heads," said the MD, as all MD's have a habit of saying, "will roll for this".

It soon became clear what the problem was; the nature of the trap into which the large corporation had fallen. They had installed, as the adverts suggested, a management information system for the managers. What they had totally ignored, because no-one had stated it explicitly, was the other half of that double-barreled name....information.

There was everyone doing extremely clever searches of a database in which there was no data, mainly because no one had ever mentioned it should be there. Now, this might sound obvious, especially to anyone working in a company with a wealth of information already available and in use. What this large corporation had ignored was the simple, and eminently overlookable fact that implementing a computerised information system is actually like starting over from the very beginning again, just like being a new-born babe.

The redundancy notices for the thousands of clerical staff were quietly put through the shredder. The smart new personal computer workstations were gently prized away from the clutches of the managers (well, you know how managers love their status symbols) and placed instead on the desks of the self-same unredundantized clerical staff. "Generate," they were told in no uncertain terms, "information."

And so they did. Before any of the decision making management could get their hands on the system designed specifically for them, they had to sit and wait for the company's clerical staff to load up all the information they were likely to. All those invoices and purchase ledger details going back into the dim and distant past had to be provided, for example: not just entered but translated from an old presentation format to one decreed by the database management system.

So far as I know, and I admit that I haven't gone back to ask, those clerks are still there, keying in the data the managers need. If they are lucky, some of the low level managers, the information filters for the top-flight whizzos, will by now have got their hands on the occasional workstation. As for the managing director's high priority personal enquiry however, that will have to wait a while yet, I suspect.

This might have been an interesting story about a large corporation that `got it wrong', had it not been for a recent survey carried out by Cambridge University's engineering department. This showed that the more a company uses computers in its operations the higher the proportion of clerical staff is likely to be. Such companies also demonstrated the wonderfully egalitarian ideal of having fewer managers as well, compared to equivalent companies that were not computerised. Not only that, but their decision making processes were far less centralised, proving conclusively what we already knew, that the Indians always know more about what's happening than the chiefs.

Lastly, these companies grew faster then the others, which just shows there is hope, despite the adverts.

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