Managing Computers in Large Organizations

Managing Microcomputers in Large Organizations
http://www.nap.edu/catalog/167.html
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MANAGING MICROCOMPUTERS AND END-USER COMPUTING SOME CRITICAL
ISSUES
of administration of information processes and resources. Let us look at each of
these issues in some detail.
As background to a discussion of the effect of end-user computing on
decision quality, I would like to introduce the notion of distributed creativity.
This is my name for the much discussed concept that organizational success
depends on innovation and a striving for excellence at all levels of the
organization.
In the book In Search of Excellence (Harper and Row, New York: 1982)
Peters and Waterman remark that in the excellent firms, “quality and service
were invariable hallmarks. To get them, of course, everyone's cooperation is
required, not just mighty labors from the top 200” (p. 24). Elsewhere in the
book, they offer an example: “3M has been described as ‘so intent on
innovation that its essential atmosphere seems not like that of a large
corporation but rather a loose network of laboratories and cubbyholes populated
by feverish inventors and dauntless entrepreneurs who let their imaginations fly
in all directions'…. They encourage private risk taking, and support good tries”
(p. 15).
In more philosophical terms, one goal of a large organization is to strike a
balance between authority and anarchy. Somewhere between these two
extremes lies a freedom to create modified by controls to insure that the
organization is cohesive and has direction. The best means of accomplishing
this is the major management theory question of this decade.
One way of answering the question goes like this: Wisdom comes from
experience and usually correlates with level in the organization. We assume the
chief executive officer is wise. Therefore, important decisions should be made
at the top. We should centralize the decision making and the analytic support.
Actual experience, however, has shown that the “top” is too far from the
action. There one loses touch with customers, vendors, operation, shops, and
labs. To restate Peters and Waterman, the best process is to transmit the wisdom
through the culture and to place most of the decision making where the action
is. If the culture transmits wise values and constraints, decisions made at lower
levels will be based on the best information in a context that guides the
decisions with experience and wisdom of top management. End-user computing
can help both to provide information and to transmit some aspects of the
cultural wisdom. How does it do this?
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