COMPUTERS AND COMPUTER NETWORKS IN THE CORPORATE BUSINESS SETTING
Thomas Malone and John Rockart (1991, pp. 128 136) argued that the advent of intensive computer networking in the corporate business setting will transform the internal structure and functioning of business organizations, and will fundamentally alter the way such organizations interact with their external environments. The authors postulated that such transformation will occur through a hierarchy of effects resulting from the implementation of computer network technology.
The first order effect in the effects hierarchy is the substitution of information technology for human coordination. An increased use of coordination is the second order effect, while the third order effect is a shift in organizational structure to one that is coordination intensive.
Corporate organizations entered a knowledge based phase of technological development in the mid 1970s, and continue in that phase of development in the 1990s. While the development of the knowledge based phase began some time ago, it is, in the early 1990s, far from complete, and no one is yet sure just what corporate organizations will be like in the early years of the next century, although the next century is less than a decade in the future.
The computer may be the most significant and pervasive technological innovation of the contemporary period. Certainly, the computer is the vehicle that makes a knowledge based society, sometimes referred to as the post industrial society, feasible.
Obviously, since the early to mid 1970s, a dynamic transition from the industrial age to some new and different type of industrial/societal organization has been in progress. Malone and Rockart (1991, pp. 128 136) think that this transition is between an industrial society and a knowledge based society.
The new corporate environment will differ significantly from that of the present period. Those industr...