A guide to information as the transformative tool of modern
business.
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.
