Technology & Leadership
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang

Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
What Richard, Mary, and Don point to is a trend in IT adoption that has held for at least the last century, but which--I think one can argue persuasively--is on the verge of becoming obsolete.

The traditional assumption among executives has been that computers are a bit like typewriters, calculators, accounting systems, and other office machines: you definitely want your subordinates to know how to use them, but they're not necessary for higher-level decision-making, policy, etc.. As Richard put it, leaders of organizations need "interpretations,... opinions, advice, experience, stories, [and] wisdom," rather lots of numbers; this has led them to prefer "access to the minds of their colleagues," as Mary put it. Maybe this has been a perfectly rational calculation. Information technologies (since the 1800s) have been designed to speed up or automate routine work (e.g. typewriters, payroll systems), collect and preserve large bodies of information (e.g. file cabinets, /punch-card tabulators), or perform mathematical calculations (e.g. calculators, early computers)--i.e., to do for secretaries, clerks, middle managers, and the like, what steam power did for factory workers.

Richard's and Mary's points also explain why communications or real-time information technologies (i.e. technologies that shorten Raymond Allen's "information float") have been adopted more quickly than information-processing and -management technologies over the last century. I think it's accurate to say, for example, that the stock ticker rose higher than the telegraph in Wall Street offices; and of course, the telephone is everywhere in an organization. This supports the idea that in the future, the important niche for IT at the senior managerial level is not going to be computing in the traditional senses--the manipulation and analysis of data, the preparation of documents, etc.--but rather communication.

I don't know of any efforts at developing communication or collaboration technologies specifically aimed at the needs or interests of senior managers, or even anyone doing research on this subject. But if Mary is right, the lines we've drawn between organizational levels, responsibility for policy, and types of intellectual labor (i.e., the higher up the organization, the more global and abstract you become) will no longer work in the future, and it will become important for our technologies to be flexible enough to work in multiple ways, or serve these various corporate subcultures.

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