Technology & Leadership
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
More about the history of IT? I'll try to weave it in as we go along, but I'll lay a couple cards face-up on the table. Put simply, the argument I've been developing--in my courses, and to a smaller degree in print and pixel--is that "information technology" covers a far wider range of things than we normally recognize; that it extends far beyond computers, networks, and other highest-profile manifestations; and that we can learn many lessons useful today from the history of information technologies as old as the telegraph, printing press, and alphabet. Being in this forum is, in some degree, a test of this theory.

To give an example of an information technology that's not usually thought of as IT: the tall office building. Interestingly, the early adopters of skyscrapers were insurance companies. Why insurance companies, and not railroads or manufacturers? Skyscrapers gave the appearance of solidity and prosperity, which is useful for an image-conscious industry; but they were also valuable as tools for managing the flow of information within the company, and making it more efficient. In the modern insurance industry, you have lots of policies, you charge a little for each, and make your money by bringing in premiums, minimizing actuarial risk, and--and this is the thing you have the most control over--keeping internal costs (of processing claims, billing, etc.) down. Skyscrapers were tools for centralizing and managing information flow, and driving down transaction costs: you could put your researchers on one floor, claims on another, marketing on another, and the information would zip around among them, rather than crawl across town. Insurance companies were early adopters because they business essentially consisted of managing money, information, and risk: hence their interest in making use of the most advanced information management tools around. (This is also why they're among the earliest business users of computers in the 1950s.)

The fact that space is still an issue in information management--or in the creation and sharing of knowledge--is one that we're fitfully realizing. John Seely Brown's book "Social Life of Information" has an elegant chapter on the ways in which space continue to define how well knowledge workers do what they do.

Participant
Alex: Your 1:14 gets us off to a good start with the following quote (I hope I didn't garble it by trying to move it here):

"information technology" covers a far wider range of things than we normally recognize; that it extends far beyond computers, networks, and other highest-profile manifestations; and that we can learn many lessons useful today from the history of information."

My current interest is in its potential use in helping democracy to survive. But this may be too far off the main focus of interest you and others here have in mind, so I will be, perhaps, confusingly brief in trying to explain what I have in mind:

A common image of "we, the people" is still rooted in the New England Town Meeting. To what extent do we want to reinvent this image for the 21st century? How might information technology help us accomplish this goal? For example, could we reshape the badly polluted referendum from adversarial sound-bite jousting into a more collaborative problem solving process?

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
Don, welcome to the forum. Where is Mt. Desert, ME?

I confess I used to be skeptical of the notion that we could use technology to revive a more intimate, collaborative form of political life; now, I'm more optimistic.

When I first heard the idea, it sounded like one of many utopian ideals projected onto the Internet in the early 1990s; but it was Brown and Duguid's "Social Life of Information" that really made the compelling case for me. (Since I keep mentioning Brown and Duguid, I should alert readers to a Web site about the book; at URL is http://www.slofi.com. Also, at the risk of self-promotion, my review of it is available at http://www.stanford.edu/~apang/personal/slofi.html.)

One of the book's main arguments is that we make a major, two-mark mistake in the information age: first, we believe that complex human activities are fundamentally a kind of information processing; and second, we assume that those activities can be comfortably fit into beige boxes running Windows. This is not to argue that efficiencies can't be achieved through computerization, or networking doesn't make distance learning and far-flung group collaboration possible. But it is to say that we tend to assume that ALL educational activities can be fit into a browser, that all the communication that happens in a face-to-face meeting can be transferred into instant messages, that skill can be downloaded into databases of best practices.

In fact, all these activities are far more complex than the information-processing model would have us believe. Education is much more than the communication of information; management is more than decision-making based on data inputs; important skills often elude description or reduction to formula; even apparently mechanical work--like copier repair--depends more on judgement and experience than we realize. These activities aren't defined by formal rules, but by culture and tacit knowledge: it's not a matter just of "knowing about," but of "knowing how." (The real tragedy comes when no one recognizes the loss until it's too late to correct it--as when libraries microfilmed books and newspapers and threw away the originals, only to find that the microfilms failed to capture the color of early newspapers, were often badly-produced, and decayed to the point of illegibility after a few years.)

Likewise, political life is one of those things that may look primarily like a form of communication, and indeed might benefit from the cooling effect that a little distance and digital rationality would provide; but there'd be a lot that would be lost in the shift from real to virtual political activity. On the other hand, there's a rich history of information--or communications—technologies (broadly defined) working with democracy. Alfred D. Chandler and James W. Cortada's "A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present" has some very interesting material the role the Founders imagined America's information infrastructure--its newspaper market, postal system, etc.--would play in improving democracy. For the founders, a rich and accessible communications infrastructure would make for better-informed citizens, and promote the unity of the nation: hence the heavy subsidies on newspaper exchanges, which made it possible for editors in Boston to get free copies on papers from Philadelphia and Richmond--and to reprint from them shamelessly. Intellectual property took a hit, but the people became better-informed--and indeed, the experience of sharing a common news helped make people become "The People."

Newspapers and mail are parts of an information infrastructure that we don't even notice, but which continue to be important to and influential in our national life. They raise the question, what kinds of activities can we reasonably expect to do as well or better online? Even if all of political life couldn't go online, what parts of it would be enhanced or augmented (to use the favorite term of local hero Doug Engelbart)? Perhaps the town meeting model would work well for local government, even if it might be unwieldy at the national level?

This is, of course, a question that we can ask of all kinds of organizational activities, including management and leadership.

Participant
Alex: I quite agree with all your warnings not to over-rate the role of technical communications. Augmenting was the correct word when Doug first invented it. Today, facilitated problem solving is more up to date.

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