chieftech’s blog

In this other post, Stewart Mader digs out the old McAfee-Davenport debate and concludes:

So Tom’s right — the absence of technology isn’t the only reason that organizations are hierarchical. The people in charge of those organizations organized them that way because it’s what they understood how to do. And Andrew’s right — today’s ubiquitous technologies that we use in all facets of our lives are different from the earlier tools that had a specific place and use.

I thought I would dig a little deeper and take a look at the history of the railways in the US for some insights into the history of these hierarchical structures we take for granted. These course materials from UC San Diego provide an overview of this history and they say:

The earliest railroads used the same simple form of business organization that almost all other businesses used at that time – the unified or entrepreneurial form of organization. This was the traditional owner-controlled facility in which the owner made the day-to-day operational decisions and set long term goals.

....

In the 1850s Daniel McCallum of the Erie Railroad perfected the operations department (responsible for moving trains and obtaining freight and traffic business) and devised the system of information flows using the telegraph. He was the first to clearly define the duties and responsibilities of the executive and administrative officers on a large railroad and to spell out the lines of authority and communication between the various officers of the road. Part of this scheme was a detailed system of information that flowed upward through the organization using the telegraph.

(Emphasis added)

I think technology has played a role in shaping organisational structure. However, the catalyst for change includes other managerial drivers, such as the need to manage scale (including a literal train wreck) and volumes of transactions, combined with the availability of an appropriate technology.

Considering Gartner is quoted as saying that "as much as 60% of an organization’s processes are unstructured – and probably also unmonitored, unmanaged, unknown and unruly" (hat tip to Sig) it sounds like we still haven't quite solved that management challenge as perfectly as the org charts might suggest. Enter new social computing technologies that offer the chance to help bridge that last effectiveness gap.

The question is, are you going to wait for your own organisational train wreck before you do something about it?

This book is an expanded version of a four part BBC Radio 4 series of the same name:

which tells the stories of some of the computer pioneers in Britain, America and the Ukraine. Each is a little cameo of social history of the early post war years half a century ago, from a time when "everything you did was new, no-one had ever done it before".

The radio series only covers some aspect of the early history of computing in the US, UK and what was post-war communist Ukraine. It also includes an episode on an unusual economic simulator that water rather than electronics . However, the book expands on this and manages to also include a chapter about the first digital computer in Australia. This coverage of the history of computing from around the world is probably the most interesting thing about this book, as it gives you an interesting perspective on the process of technology innovation.

I must admit the story from the Ukraine ("So Then we Took The Roof Off") failed to grab me, but maybe I should go and listen to the original radio version as I suspect some of the impact of that story might have been lost in translation to the written word. However, the key message of that story was that the invention of the computer wasn't something based on a sudden flash of inspiration - instead, it was the natural evolution of technology that created the potential for it to happen. In other words someone, somewhere was going to invent the computer at that point in human history.

Of course the commercialisation and mass popularisation of that technology is another story all together, which is touched on in the final chapter with the story of IBM ("It's Not About Being First").

Overall, I enjoyed this book but was also a little disappointed because there is only so much you can fit into a single chapter about each of the periods covered. Perhaps I would have enjoyed it more if I had listened to the radio show first, as the book claims to also expand further on the stories in those original broadcast rather than simply being a transcript. On the plus side, it was good to learn something new about the history of computing in places outside of the US and UK.

If you like the idea of this book, I also suggest you have a look at A Computer called LEO (the story of Britain's first business computer - reviewed over on my old blog) and also The Electric Universe (which places computing in the context of the history of electricity).