An advertisement campaign which ran in various magazines in late 1986 seemed, at first glance, to be offering, for a mere £1.35, a red Lamborghini sports car capable of travelling 3,000, 000 miles on one gallon of petrol. Imagine what effect such a schoolboy fantasy, if realised, would have on the world - on the oil, motor and transport industries to start with. It would change everything.
It was, of course, an allegory, the clue to which was the logo of the adver-
Figure 2a The 'pro-team', an embryonic knowhow company, lacks managerial knowhow but may develop into a knowhow company by acquiring it.
It normally takes many years to reach the ideal - the professional knowhow organisation.
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tiser, the accountancy firm Ernst & Whinney's consultancy division, tucked away on the bottom right-hand corner of the two-page spread. The advertisement was designed to illustrate the extent to which the price:performance ratio of computers has improved since their birth 30 years ago. The super-economical, super-cheap Lamborghini is what would now be commonplace in the automotive world had the car undergone the same development.
The computer is both a creature of the information society and its most powerful driving force. It is a product in its own right but, much more important, it is an all-purpose tool of awesome power. And one of the few assertions about the future that can be made with any confidence is that the computers of to- morrow will make to-day's machines seem puny and hugely expensive by comparison. In the computer world the equivalent of the ten million miles per gallon, 10p Lamborghini is barely a decade away.
The computer was made for knowhow companies. As an extension of the human brain it has the potential to lever knowhow to heights undreamed of just a few years ago. Knowhow companies and computers both pre-date the advent of the information society but both exemplify it in the same way cotton mills and steam engines exemplified the industrial society.
Computers store information, help to convert it into knowhow and act as nodes in the networks and communication channels that constitute the fabric of knowhow companies. They take much of the drudgery out of knowhow working, freeing the professionals for more creative kinds of activity for which com- puters, as yet, have little aptitude.
There is software to help with such typical professional tasks as calculation, word-processing, design and project planning. And software for structured decision-making - another typically professional task - will be available soon.
· With a word-processing package the professionals can write their own re- ports as well as a trained secretary and much more quickly than if they had to write a first draft by hand.
· With the aid of the computer the professional can access databases through- out the world and, with the help of search software, can distil the information he retrieves down to the bare essentials with a few well-chosen keystrokes.
· With the aid of the computer professionals can keep track of networks, send small reminders, notes or just greetings. Database and word-processing software can reduce what were once large jobs, such as printing 100s of addresses, to routine tasks swiftly executed.
To those who work near computers the idea that these machines can improve and extend communications and actually enhance human relations will seem a mite implausible. Society seems filled with computer freaks or 'hackers' who isolate themselves from others. Computer knowhow is a knowhow area in its own right.
There are those as 'as it and those 'as don't.
But the 'hackers' are a transitional species. They are not the typical
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MANGING KNOWHOWprofessionals of the future. They will become a small but necessary minority.
They can be compared with people like Noam Chomsky and Simon Dik, the inventors of the 'transformational' and 'functional' grammars respectively. As they study language, the rest of us talk to each other. As the computer freaks study computers, the rest of us use them.
The computer is a tool of many parts. It can be used for so many different purposes that at present armies of 'hacker' professionals are still needed just to seek out new applications. But the relative multiplicity of computer freaks in the world today is a temporary phenomenon; a sign that computer technology is still in its infancy.
The example of the LASER (Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation), a relatively trivial invention compared to the computer, illustrates how multi-purpose tools adapt to the world and force the world to adapt to them.
Initially the laser, invented by the US physicist Charles Townes in 1958, was no more than a laboratory curiosity. Its coherent beam could be used to map the Moon's surface more accurately than ever before but to all practical intents and purposes it was a solution in search of a problem. It has subsequently found a whole host of problems. Lasers are the key elements in modem gyro compasses, they will soon be driving the world's fibre optic telecommunications networks, they have become domesticated in Compact Disc audio players which are about to become hugely powerful computer storage devices. They will also be driving the next generation of optical computers and they have found many applications in manufacturing, ranging from the marking of goods, metrology, alignment and the whole area of holography. For a while the laser became a famous technology as it conquered more and more fields. Nowadays it is so well established that one rarely hears of it. It has retreated into the background.
The professionals of the information society must know how to handle the computer. They have no option if they are to stay in the forefront of their respective fields. The professional who cannot handle a computer in the twenty- first century will be like a Wild West cowboy afraid of horses.
· Computers - the factories and warehouses of the twenty-first century Computers are the factories and warehouses of the twenty-first century. They play the same role in the information society as factories and warehouses played in the industrial society.
One obvious difference is that information stored in data files is less tangible than an item of equipment stored in a warehouse, but the most important dis- tinguishing feature of the computer is that it can not only store knowhow, it can also manipulate it and turn it into new knowhow.
Computers can acquire, organise and store stock (data) and, by applying to it software incorporating knowhow, they can add value to the raw data. They represent, in terms of the information society, something akin to the fully auto- mated production process traditional manufacturers dream of.
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· Opportunities for the entrepreneur
The business horizons of the entrepreneur are extended enormously by the computer. Knowhow can be stored, processed, refined and packaged with data- base, word-processing and statistical software and transmitted far and wide using the computer as a node in a communications network.
The all-purpose nature of the computer makes it applicable to most modern industries. It is, even now, transforming many 'industrial' service organisations into knowhow companies, sometimes without the top executives of the companies concerned being aware of it.
· Banking - a case in point
The banks are no longer merely brokers of capital and credit. They are being transformed into knowhow companies. The process began more than a decade ago when the computers were first brought in as banking support tools. Until 1975 they were mainly used to rationalise the work load in order to reduce the number of employees. They took over much of the paperwork and permitted the automation of a proportion of desk transactions.
The critical point came when the computers were linked to each other through networks. Today it is hard to find a bank anywhere which is not connec- ted, internally and externally, through computer networks. So far the network has mainly been used for 'heavy' administrative traffic like accountancy infor- mation and transactions between accounts.
A new kind of network - the network of the information society- is now being installed in many banks and shops. It is used to serve clients. 'Debit' regis- ters in shops are being connected to banks. Cash and even credit cards are becoming theoretically if not yet actually superfluous.