In the day of the smokestack it was assumed that workers knew little of importance and that relevant information or intelligence could be gathered by top management or a tiny staff. The proportion of the work force engaged in knowledge processing was tiny. Today, by contrast, we are finding that much of what happens inside a firm is aimed at replenishing its continually decaying knowledge inventory, generating new knowledge to add to it, and upgrading simple data into information and knowledge. A longer version, which served as a road map for this one, was developed by James Saveland, Southeast Experiment Station. The subheadings are mine.
Specialized executives gain their power from control of information in the cubbyholes.
Managers gain theirs through their control of information flowing through the channels. What we see, then, is a burgeoning crisis at the very heart of bureaucracy. This is the notion that it is possible to pre-specify who in the company needs to know what. The significant fact is that we are now moving toward powerful forms of knowledge processing that are profoundly antibureaucratic. . . . This form of information storage and processing points toward a deep revolution in the way we think, analyze, synthesize, and express information, and a forward leap in organizational creativity. . . .