While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google's
ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole
firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty
percent of workers collect and analyze information (often in digital form) in the course
of doing their jobs.
This book offers a guide to the role of information in modern business,
mapping the use of information within work processes and tracing flows of information
across supply-chain management, product development, customer relations, and sales.
The emphasis is on information itself, not on information technology.
Information, overshadowed for a while by the glamour and novelty of IT, is the fundamental
component of the modern corporation.
In Information and the Modern Corporation, longtime IBM manager and consultant James
Cortada clarifies the differences among data, facts, information, and knowledge and
describes how the art of analytics has all but eliminated decision making based on gut
feeling, replacing it with fact-based decisions. He describes the working style of
"road warriors," whose offices are anywhere their laptops and cell phones are
and whose deep knowledge of a given topic becomes their medium of exchange. Information is
the core of the modern enterprise, and the use of information defines the activities of a
firm. This essential guide shows managers and employees better ways to leverage
information--by design and not by accident.
James W. Cortada has worked at IBM for more than thirty-five years in
various sales, consulting, and managerial positions. He currently works in IBM's core
business research center, the Institute for Business Value. He is the author of many
books, including Making the Information Society, The Digital Hand, and How Societies
Embrace Information Technology.
176 pages, Paperback