TABLE OF CONTENTS

<table><thead><tr><th></th><th>Page</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td>I. Introduction</td><td>1</td></tr><tr><td>II. Compunications and Knowledge</td><td>5</td></tr><tr><td>III. Scope and Limitations of Compunications</td><td>6</td></tr><tr><td>IV. The Old Ways of Hierarchies</td><td>9</td></tr><tr><td>V. What Decision-Makers are Thought to Lack</td><td>12</td></tr><tr><td>VI. Technology and the Hierarchies</td><td>15</td></tr><tr><td>VII. The Case for Flexibility</td><td>17</td></tr><tr><td>VIII. Compunications for Chiefs and for Indians</td><td>20</td></tr><tr><td>IX. The Case for Practicality</td><td>25</td></tr><tr><td>X. In The Beginning ...</td><td>31</td></tr></tbody></table>

# Communications* in the National Decision-Making Process

## I. Introduction

National decision-making is one of the most complex and vital of those many processes in our civilization which critically depend on information derived from that vast and heterogeneous flow of raw data that leads people to complain, not inconsistently, of both information overload and a lack of relevant and timely information. Fortunately, the spectacular development of communications has given us a promising array of powerful tools and techniques for the rapid processing of masses of data. How might these tools and techniques best be brought to bear on national decision-making processes? The need for such assistance is evident from the conviction of the current President, shared by most of his recent predecessors, "that the old ways are no longer adequate, and that much of the old machinery is obsolescent if not obsolete." (Nixon, 1969, p. 2)

I deliberately speak of "assistance", for few of us would knowingly tolerate having vital choices, for instance about war and peace, made solely by automatic systems. Art Buchwald's gallows humor neatly expresses this widespread popular sentiment: "The beauty of having a computer for a president is that we no longer would have to worry about human error. It's true, we still would have to worry about a computer erring, but on the other hand, if a computer erred, we wouldn't have to worry about it very long." (Buchwald, 1969)

Taken literally, the threat envisaged in the popular nightmare of computers running the country is pure nonsense. The danger of unwanted delegation of Constitutional responsibilities is far more real. Nearly

* Computers and communications have long since become inseparable. It is time to reflect this union in the fusion of their names.

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ten years ago Richard Neustadt pointed out that "technology has modified the Constitution: the President perforce becomes the only elected man in the system capable of exercising judgment under the extraordinary limits now imposed by secrecy, complexity, and time." (Neustadt, pp. 187-188) And so Neustadt concludes that, "as a matter . . . of preserving the essentials in our democratic order, a President these days is virtually compelled to reach for information and to seek control over details of operation deep inside executive departments". Only by doing so is there "a fleeting chance -- sometimes the only chance -- to interject effective judgment." (Neustadt, p. 188) Under our Constitution, vital judgments on war and peace devolve upon an elected President and an elected Congress. What Art Buchwald correctly senses is that these judgments are now the President's alone and what he fears is further delegation to a second lieutenant or to a computer.

Less dramatically in all of the daily routine matters that consume the bulk of his attention, any official's reach for information affects the balance of powers not only within the Executive branch itself but also among all the branches of our government. How government officials at all levels are informed is therefore a deeply political matter vital to the public interest. If communications are to become in fact the extraordinarily useful servants they can be in principle, their integration into the machinery of government cannot be left to salesmen and to technicians as now is mainly the case. A sharp and continuing sensitivity to administrative and political consequences is essential.

Nor can so vital a matter be left to those neo-Luddites who see in technology nothing but a scapegoat. One simple example of an indispensable automatic decision-making system will show what valuable assistants communications systems have become in one form of decision-making. By calling attention to essential elements common to all decision-making systems, this same example will help us

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in understanding the less obvious and more critical national processes in which
compunications can and do play useful roles.

Daily, routinely and in millions of homes, the decision to turn the
heat on or off is made by a simple automatic system. Few of us would want
is any other way. Admittedly, the homely thermostat is so simple an analog
machine that it barely deserves to be called a computer. It is a far cry from
the complex digital machines that process our checks or guide our spaceships,
but it makes decisions for us all winter long. When room temperature reaches
the level where we have set our thermostat, it shuts off the heat; when the
temperature drops, it turns it on again.

Like many of its more elaborate brothers, the thermostat is both a
source and a receiver of messages. Contacts closing in our living room
thermostat close the circuit actuating the furnace air blower or water pump
tucked away in our cellar. The furnace and pumps communicate with the thermo-
stat through the ambient air, heating and bending a bimetallic element in the
thermostat so that, when the decision point is reached, the contacts open up
again. Like all significant messages, these electrical or airborne signals
are intended to alter the behavior of their receiver. Through these messages,
furnace and thermostat are linked in a closed loop -- the feedback loop of the
control engineers -- that inextricably binds up the actions of the one with
the actions of the other, in a typically endless chain of cause and effect.

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So it is also for a President and for all other government officials. An official reaches for information that will inform and widen the choices available to him. The world changes when he makes his influence felt, and presents him with new information about new situations to react to in turn. The links of this endless chain are as interdependent as those of our heating system. Getting information is one major piece of this chain. Using it effectively is another. Although I limit my remarks to information flow toward officials, this restriction is defensible only on the ground of expediency.

In either direction, the Presidency, accountable to the Congress, works through the agencies that comprise the Executive branch. At all levels of this collection of hierarchies, there are officials who need to reach for information among subordinates, to act on it, and to pass some of it on to their superiors. Although the specific authority, responsibility and point of view of any

official may be unique to himself, there is, throughout any hierarchy, a fundamental commonality of dual upward responsibility and downward authority and a common participation in the same endless chain.

Hence, whatever assistance, compunications might give, they must give to all levels of a hierarchy. This essential requirement is generally missed by those who speak glibly of "management information systems", who see only the mirage of dramatic decisions explicitly made at the apex of a hierarchy and who overlook the reality of the diffuse, interdependent, and often implicit decision-making taking place throughout the line and staff echelons of a hierarchy.

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How effectively communications might assist these hierarchies in decision-making obviously depends on what technology can and cannot do in principle. More critically perhaps, it also depends on the human needs and on the institutional contexts which determine how the new tools of technology are selected, integrated into organizations and used in practice. I shall therefore explore the powers and the limitations of the technology, examine the people and the institutions that will use the tools to meet their needs for information and sketch how the tools fit those needs.

## II. Communications and Knowledge

The essential power of communications is this: they can compress the flow of time and the span of space to an extent and with an ease that falter appreciably only as far away as Mars. Within that radius anyone anywhere can instantaneously put or look at voluminous data in computer files anywhere else within reach of the communications network. Within that same radius widely scattered individuals can have face to face teleconferences with instantaneous interactions. To see how such systems might best be harnessed to meet an official's need for information or, more precisely, his need for knowledge, we must turn to a brief analysis of the relations between knowledge and communications.

**Knowledge** is in the mind of the beholder; **data** are the raw materials from which he fashions his knowledge of the world with the **theories** at his disposal. Since either pure raw data or theories without factual foundations can give the appearance of knowledge, both are, all too often, confused with knowledge. Without data, the physicist's differential equations, the economist's input-output models, the social scientist's definitions of social indicators and the

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statesman's political philosophies, are all examples of pure theory. In them-
selves, reports of observed orbital velocities, freight car loadings, riots in
the cities or body counts are pure data. Knowledge results only if there are
theories to fit the facts and vice-versa.

All these terms are already in widespread colloquial use with broader
or altogether different meanings. The wealth of professional jargons that
ascribe specialized and sometimes conflicting technical meanings to these terms
adds to the confusion about the age-old epistemological questions concerning
the relations among data, theories and knowledge. We speak of electronic data-
processing and information processing, sometimes interchangeably and sometimes,
with more than a dash of wishful thinking, equating "information" with "know-
ledge". To professionals in that field, "intelligence" means roughly what
I mean by "knowledge" and "information" what I mean by data (Ransom, p. 7).
The confusion is further compounded by qualitative questions about the pre-
cision and the accuracy of data or about the interpretive abilities of individuals.

Using the terms "data", "theories" and "knowledge" as I have implicitly
defined them here, let us look at what roles communications can play in the
processes of selection, collation, and interpretation that combine data and
theories to produce knowledge.

### III. Scope and Limitations of Communications

The pure communications systems of the past are less troublesome to analyze
that those which now combine computers and communications. The telephone and
telegraph are passive, merely storing data essentially as received and passing
them on essentially unaltered. There are, to be sure, subtle effects that
distinguish the voice at a distance or the face on the tube from the man across

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the table. Much remains to be done before men can be as comfortable (or as edgy!) in a conference by television as they are face to face around a table. However, pure communications systems do not actively combine data and theories, as communications systems can be made to do.

Under the control of a program that necessarily embodies theories held by its human designers, whether explicitly formulated or not, a computer system can actively select, collate, interpret and store data. The sources of data may be anywhere within reach of a communications network and so may the destinations of the resulting products. Some of the possible physical realizations of such systems have been sketched by John Kemeny in the first lecture of this series. (Kemeny, 1969).

Some research on computers is spurred by the hope that computers may, some day, embody an artificial intelligence as effective in some realms as human intelligence, or even more so. The theories nowadays found embodied in experimental computer programs may thus range from the tried-and true, as in the arithmetic of payroll programs, to the highly speculative, as in attempts to make computers "understand" written texts.

The only programs within this wide range which are suitable for service in action-oriented settings, as opposed to research or development oriented settings are those which embody well-tested theories. Nowadays, these fall in the following categories, which therefore bracket the useful range of communications systems in decision-making:

(1) Theories, mainly quantitative in formulation, belonging to the physical sciences, as in the case of our heating system, continuous-flow process control systems, airplane or missile guidance systems, etc.

(2) Theories, (often called "models" in the disciplines that create them) reflecting those limited aspects of economics and other social sciences which can be reliably quantified without ceasing to reflect reality. Examples include

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inventory control systems, date-matching systems, systems
for analyzing polls or samples as in the prediction of
election outcomes, macroeconomic models of national economies,
etc.

(3) Arbitrary but generally accepted conventions that lend them-
selves to explicit formulation as programs for the manipula-
tion of either quantitative or non-numeric data. Payroll
and other accounting and administrative systems are the prime
examples. Airline reservations systems, directories, file or
library indexing, storage and retrieval systems are in this
category. So, barely, are systems like PERT and PPBS in
their administrative control and retrospective accounting
aspects. (Oettinger, 1964, 1969)

While we all bet our lives daily on many systems based on theories of the first category, these physically oriented systems are, in general, less aids to decision-making than they are aids to implementing decisions. As such, they are not central to our theme. Like human decision-makers, modelling systems of the second category are consumers of raw data. Their practical value ultimately depends on the quality and quantity of data that can be put at their disposal.

It is the systems based on arbitrary but generally accepted conventions that are today's bread and butter. They are the indispensable repositories of the accounting data that custom calls essential. They help with such chores as accumulating snapshots of tomorrow morning's passenger lists that are good enough to run an airline by. Increasingly, they are looked to as the place to store data that might provide a snapshot of the real world good enough to run a country by. Primarily data storage systems linked

to sources and users of data, these systems are barely beginning
to perform rudimentary data selection, collation, and interpretation functions.
It is such systems that we must match to the information needs of decision-makers
and their hierarchical institutions, if any assistance is to be forthcoming here
and now, and not mañana in never-never land.

#### IV. The Old Ways of Hierarchies

The ways in which a President keeps himself informed are both informal and formal, both private and public. Franklin Roosevelt persistently relied on "a myriad of private, informal, and unorthodox channels and espionage networks" (Schlesinger, 1959, p. 523) and cross-checked his information by fomenting intense competition among his sources (Neustadt, 1964, p. 150). Eisenhower "preferred to let subordinates proceed upon the lowest common denominators of agreement than to have their quarrels -- and issues and details -- pushed up to him" (Neustadt, 1964, p. 154). A President also uses the various public news media, as Kennedy did most extensively. The exploitation of private, informal information sources strongly depends on the personality of a President. The public media of our free society are largely beyond his formal reach.

My primary concern here is not with the informal or private sources of
information a President or any other government official uses, but with all
the formal organs of the Executive branch, viewed as a composite of many hier-
archies, each culminating in a department head with specialized interests,
such as a member of the Cabinet, and each fanning downward through many levels
of delegated authority and responsibility.

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Every level receives data from the "outside" and, except for the lowest level, also from subordinates in the hierarchy. In the formal hierarchical concept, the flow is wholly vertical without direct communication among the officials in the different branches of the hierarchy. Data flow upward and requests downward, with direct communication only between one level and its immediately superior and subordinate levels.

At each level, data collected from the next lower level of the hierarchy become grist for the processes of selection, collation and interpretation which yield *knowledge* to be held in the minds of the men or stored in the drawers of the file cabinets at that level and to be passed on as *data* for the same processes at the next higher level. Whatever his level, every man plays dual roles. Hierarchically, he is both a subordinate to his bosses and a boss to his subordinates. Functionally he is both a seeker of knowledge and a source of data.

One man's knowledge is thus another man's data. This relativization of the definition of data also implies an ordering of data by "rawness", from the rawest uninterpreted data -- like a report of a million dollar budget overrun -- to highly interpretive data, like memoranda from various sources describing the reasons for the overrun, and making suggestions for appropriate action. The apparent simplicity of communications systems based on convention is therefore deceptive. Were they confined to dealing only with data of the rawest kind and of the most picayune detail, the usefulness of such systems would, with few exceptions, be confined to the lowest echelons of a hierarchy. But highly interpretive data are still data, and systems based on convention can therefore also serve the highest echelons with generalized data resulting from selection, collation and interpretation at the immediately lower echelons.

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The details of how such systems really function in practice are determined
in part by how the mix of two equally vital but opposing tendencies is set. The
head of any level might, at one extreme, personally select, collate and inter-
pret all the rawest data collected at all levels below him. This minimizes
the filtering of data by the minds of others but maximizes communications re-
quirements and information overload. At the other extreme, he might rely
entirely on the data furnished by his immediate subordinates and on the inter-
pretations made by his staff and his advisers, thus minimizing communications
and information overload but maximizing filtering. Neither extreme is workable.
At any but the lowest echelons of a hierarchy, total command at all times of all
potentially relevant data is quite literally impossible to achieve nowadays.
As Herbert Simon noted in the previous lecture, it is the attention of recipients
that is the scarcest commodity in information processing systems. (Simon lecture)
Yet, absolute reliance on subordinates and staff amounts to a total abdication
of responsibility, since *informed* personal choices become impossible.

The mix of another related set of opposing tendencies is also important
to us. The pure hierarchical concept sees the world as divisible into mutually
exclusive dominions, but the world obstinately refuses to be so neat. The pure
hierarchy I have described therefore deprives everyone but the man at its very
apex from data that may be relevant to his job but happen to fall in someone
else's dominion. At best, significant collations and interpretations are
delayed until all relevant data meet at a high enough level. At worst, they
are never made at all, since data judged to be insignificant in the absence
of the correlative data will not be passed upward. Should happenstance supply
the correlative data, "that's not my department" may nonetheless prevail. On
the other hand, a total absence of hierarchy and of concomitant partitioning
is quite impractical in an enterprise of the size and scope of the United States

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government. Too vague a partitioning can produce far too many reviews of the
same data and, when responsibility is too diffuse, everyone passes the buck.

In most healthy organizations, the hierarchy defined in the organization chart is indeed only a conventional abstraction. In reality, there are varying degrees of horizontal communication, of multiple allegiances, and of other devices that explain the evident liveliness of organizations that look dead on paper. (Oettinger, 1964) Like the secondary blood vessels which gradually take over vital functions following a failure of a main coronary vessel, these shifting organizational jumpers, although frequently invisible to the casual eye, are often the most significant keys to understanding the balance between hierarchy and anarchy in organization. (Wilensky, p. 47)

## V. What Decision-Makers are Thought to Lack

Modern Presidents and their subordinates have not lacked for either reading matter or willing advisers. In fact, speaking of one information source, Admiral William F. Raborn said shortly before stepping down as the CIA's director that "we disseminate finished intelligence in an infinite variety of formats, tailored to specific purposes." (Raborn, p. 78) This tailoring to specific purposes reflects awareness of the scarcity of attention, of the need, in Simon's words, to organize "the manager's environment of information so as to reduce the amount of time he must devote to receiving it." (Simon lecture)

Yet, as recent Presidents have seen it, the present mix settings are unsatisfactory. The dangers of tailoring or filtering are a major concern. In commenting on his brother's experience in the Cuban missile crisis, Robert Kennedy wrote that he frequently "saw advisers adapt their opinions to what they believed President Kennedy and, later, President Johnson wished to hear." (Kennedy, p. 111-112)

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Townsend Hoopes reports the following colloquy between Lyndon Johnson and Dean Acheson over Vietnam: "With all due respect, Mr. President, the Joint Chiefs of Staff don't know what they are talking about.' The President said that was a shocking statement. Acheson replied that, if such it was, then perhaps the President ought to be shocked. The President said he wanted Acheson's considered judgment; Acheson replied he could give this only if he were free to make his own inquiry into the facts so that he would not be dependent on 'canned briefings' from the JCS, Rostow, and the CIA." (Hoopes, pp. 106-107).

Similar perceptions are reported in homologous situations lower in the hierarchy. What happens in homologous subordinate situations more or less directly and forcefully affects the options of superiors as the effects pass through the endless chain. A congressional subcommittee report on the U.S.S. Pueblo and EC-121 plane incidents states that: "If nothing else the inquiry reveals the existence of a vast and complex military structure capable of acquiring almost infinite amounts of information but with a demonstrated inability, in these two instances, to relay this information in a timely and comprehensible fashion to those charged with the responsibility for making decisions." (Pueblo, 1969, p. 1619) An inability of any link of the endless chain being an inability of the whole chain, all bosses at every level need subordinates with knowledge and initiative in direct proportion to their own need to husband their own scarce attention.

That there are knowledgeable people at lower levels or that they will relay data in a timely and comprehensible fashion cannot be taken for granted. As Harold Wilensky put it, "in reporting at every level, hierarchy is conducive to concealment and misrepresentation." (Wilensky, p. 43) Harry H. Ransom took note eleven years ago that "as the specialization of (the intelligence community's compartments deepens, it becomes a Herculean task to fit together

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into a coherent pattern the information so independently developed" (Ransom, pp. 213-214), noting also, in consonance with the congressional subcommittee's more recent observations, that "the endless compartmented accumulation of facts tends to be identified as the essence of knowledge" (p. 214).

Solutions to the problems of compartmentation are often sought through such mechanisms as coordinating committees. However, such practices are bound to reduce timeliness and, as committee processes, they are likely to pass through only information reduced to a lowest common denominator of agreement, material "so screened and selected before submission to the White House that it is scarcely indicative of 'problems and progress' in any real sense of the word -- certainly not in any complete sense of the word." (Guthrie and Kennedy, 1969, p. 29) As Robert Kennedy put it, "there is an important element missing when there is unanimity of viewpoint. (Kennedy, 1969, p. 112)

Moreover, compartmentation is deeply ingrained in the hierarchy of the Executive branch which is, to some extent, a hierarchy in appearance only. As Neustadt writes, "the men who share in governing this country frequently appear to act as though they were in business for themselves. So, in a real though not entire sense, they are and have to be," (Neustadt, p. 51), as a consequence both of the constitutional and statutory definitions of separate institutions and shared powers within the Executive branch and of the delegation by the President of decisive tasks. Although responsible to the President, federal administrators "also are responsible to Congress, to their clients, to their staffs, and to themselves." (Neustadt, p. 47) They are also competitors not readily brought to meaningful consensus for, having five masters, "only after all of those do they owe any loyalty to each other." (Neustadt, p. 47)

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The consequences of shared power and of competition, combined with the ways of partitioned hierarchies, are more likely to account for sluggish and uninformative institutional responses to requests for data than either personal incompetence or gross failures to appreciate the negative consequences of partitioning and compartmentation and to pay lip service to their avoidance. Many office-holders have "almost unlimited reserves of the enormous power which consists of sitting still" (Neustadt, p. 50). When Truman asked his Secretary of Commerce to sign wage orders and price requests during the seizure of the steel industry in 1952, although the latter "did not refuse to act, he managed to immerse himself in preparations." (Neustadt, p. 34)

## VI. Technology and the Hierarchies

By virtue of compressing the flow of time and the span of space, computations technology offers the hope, likely our only hope, for the flexibility necessary to overcome excessive filtering and delays in the process of organizing the manager's environment of information while still minimizing his information overload and overcoming the fragmentation inherent in endless compartmented accumulation of facts in partitioned hierarchies. This hope cannot be realized without institutional change.

Indeed, without institutional change, computations systems can lend themselves quite readily to the more efficient and the more impregnable entrenchment of the old ways, to the more comfortable exercise of the enormous power of sitting still.

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Ransom reported in 1958 that, "although no published details are available, the Central Intelligence Agency employs modern systems and devices for processing and handling data." (Ransom, p. 35) In the new preface to the 1965 edition of *Strategic Intelligence*, Sherman Kent writes that "computers ... are already becoming the indispensable tools for solving the intelligence analysts' problems of information storage and retrieval" and that "the computer has also had its dramatic impact on analysis," adding that "the activity of intelligence research has deepened and broadened, but thanks to the new uses of electronics it can move with a speed commensurate at least with the speed of the world's rate of change." (Kent, p. xv) Many other parts of the Executive branch now also use computers in various phases of their operations.

But the complaints sampled in Section V were expressed throughout this period. In 1969, the Pueblo Subcommittee, granting that "the technical ability of military units involved in both the U.S.S. Pueblo and EC-121 incidents to transmit messages to other commands appeared, for the most part, to have been satisfactory" concluded ... that "the advantages of speedy, modern, and sophisticated communications equipment were often more than offset by the indecisive and inefficient handling of these communications by the various commands involved." (Pueblo, p. 1624) The persistent organizational factors inherent in the structure of the Executive branch as a partitioned hierarchy with shared powers and with internal competition suggest sufficient causes.

My conclusion, reached in the context of education, that "the prevalent notion that the possession of technological devices is sufficient impetus to change is ... an illusion" (Oettinger, 1969, p. 44) seems valid for national decision-making processes as well. Here, as in other realms, the salesmen of technology are only too eager to "modernize" existing processes through the obvious and thoughtless expedient of pouring the old ways, essentially unchanged,

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into more expensive (to the government), more profitable (to the salesmen) and
more dazzling (to the user) systems that often leave the results unimproved in
any discernible way. However valuable in principle, new technology will not
be valuable in practice unless its introduction is accompanied by appropriate
institutional changes.

## VII. The Case for Flexibility

Flexibility is vital in a communications
system that is to help people whose work is a blend of routine crises leavened
by occasional extraordinary crises. In the routine course of events, reliance
on data furnished by immediate subordinates and on interpretations of these
data by staff and advisers can serve appropriately to minimize the information
overload of a chief. Facts endlessly accumulated in the various compartments
of the disjoint partitions of the hierarchies can be fit into a coherent pattern
as they percolate upward and eventually meet at a high enough level. On the
scales between the extremes of the two mixes described in Section IV, these
are now the normal settings. But a system set at "normal", must promptly
adapt itself to the secular march of events that change what is meant by
"coherent pattern" and it must be immediately responsive to the sudden extra-
ordinary crisis.

These requirements put a high premium on having knowledgeable people at all
levels. At the present stage of development of computer technology, changing
computer hardware or software in response to accidental or rapid secular changes
in their action setting is a matter of months at least. Knowledgeable people
adapt themselves faster and far more intelligently. These requirements put a
high premium on open communications channels capable of putting knowledgeable
people face-to-face quickly, wherever they might be in space or in the hier-
archies. They put a high premium on computer systems based on arbitrary conventions,

whose modest role, a vital one nonetheless, is to put data of the appropriate
level of generality promptly in the hands of the people, at all levels of the
hierarchies, who need them, when they need them. By virtue of their very
simplicity such systems can better adapt to rapid shifts in focus from the
general to the picayune as well as to rapid shifts in subjects of interest
than can the modelling systems described in Section III.

This hardly implies, as some over-enthusiastic advocates of management
information systems propose, the absurd vision of the President of the United
States, or most other managers, pecking away at teletypewriter keyboards to
retrieve such data as high-level memoranda or the last known coordinates of the
EC-121 from a computer file. Even today, almost 100 years after the first tele-
phone, many executives will not waste time dialing their own calls. Many others
do so, of course and, in time, many people at all levels of hierarchies will
think nothing of helping themselves directly to computer files or of putting
data directly into them.

What is more likely to happen now at all levels is that chiefs and indians
will do as Johnson and Dean Acheson did when the latter asked for
freedom (meaning, no doubt, authority) to make his own inquiry into the facts:
"The President agreed he should have the necessary resources for an independent
study. Acheson thereupon assembled a small group of knowledgeable people at
the second and third levels and worked with them over a two-week period,
holding meetings at his home where he cross-examined them at length." (Hoopes,
p. 107) One can readily imagine that each of these second and third level
people levied data of varying degrees of generality from people two, three or
more levels down from themselves, creating at many levels situations homologous
to what took place in the President's office.

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In extraordinary crises when, as Neustadt noted, "a President ... is virtually compelled to ... seek control over details of operation deep inside executive departments" a President's staff, if not the President himself, may well find it necessary directly to access data from the most general to the most picayune and to confer with knowledgeable people at levels from the second to the lowest, bypassing hierarchical levels and breaking through partitions. For the lesser extraordinary crises, homologous situations arise for chiefs everywhere in the hierarchies.

To be useful, therefore, communications systems must be flexible enough for the settings of the two mixes to be changed promptly to fit the occasion. To minimize information overload, they normally must assist the regular flow of increasingly generalized data upward step-by-step from subordinate to immediate superior. To minimize filtering, they must also instantaneously permit downward leaps over an arbitrary number of levels and across arbitrary partitions in search of detailed data or of knowledgeable people.

These systems must be planned to legitimize and reinforce horizontal jumpers. These informal channels -- created nowadays through the semi-surreptitious habit our best civil servants have of breaking down in practice the endless compartmentation that exists in principle -- are what make knowledgeable people knowledgeable. In normal crises, these jumpers enhance individual initiative and, by decentralizing and diffusing routine decision-making throughout organizations, they prevent catastrophic information overload of superiors. In extraordinary crises, they guarantee that the knowledgeable people at all levels -- who are so necessary at such times -- will, in fact, be knowledgeable and, as important, intelligible.

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A man who has been confined to some narrow compartment of his own hierarchy will obviously be ignorant of the context of his work and thereby be less knowledgeable and effective even within his narrow confines. Worse yet, when tapped for information or advice from outside his accustomed channels, he will, whether historian, lawyer, soldier, or scientist, often fail to understand the questions put to him. If he understands the question, he will reply in untranslatable and hence unintelligible jargon usually because he can't help himself but, on occasion, because opaqueness is yet another guise of the enormous power of sitting still. By opening horizontal lines of communication, jumpers have, as is well-known, a broadening and civilizing influence. A man with well-connected jumpers is better equipped, as a chief, to distill knowledge from data his subordinates give him and, as an Indian, to supply timely and comprehensible data to his superiors.

## VIII. Communications for Chiefs and for Indians

Flexibility in setting both of the mixes described in Section IV can be greatly increased in principle by the effective application of communications technology. The institutional changes necessary to make the new technology valuable in practice are implicit in the following two significant new principles governing communications systems in the Executive branch:

1. A chief's principle of direct access, control and supervision for all communications systems in the Executive branch.

2. An Indian's principle of unfettered access by all hierarchies to all communications systems in the Executive branch.

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Both principles apply with equal force at all of the homologous levels of the hierarchy. The first especially applies to the Presidency.

These principles complement but do not supplant partitioned hierarchies and their conventional mix-setting mechanisms. Occasional shifts in the settings of the two mixes do ensue from those reorganizations that alter the partitioning of hierarchies to adapt to new world views, as by creating new departments or by shuffling bureaus; competitive patterns within and among the hierarchies may change. But when the principles governing their common relationship to the Presidency remain the same, such shifts help a President only temporarily, if at all. Granted the well-known shortcomings of partitioned hierarchies, it would nonetheless be quixotic to suggest radical departures from such structures in the Executive branch. Because these structures are vital links in the endless chain, they should not be wantonly tampered with; being enshrined in statutes and in traditions, they are hard to change. The specific delegations of authority and responsibility inherent in hierarchy, and the division of labor inherent in partitioning are necessary to cope with the enormous scope and diversity of modern executive routine.

Before discussing the important and strong arguments against literal interpretation of these principles and sketching how they might be applied in practice, a word about what makes them new and significant. Either principle could have been stated at any point in history. Both have always been practiced by governments of the tribal type. Without communications technology neither could be put into practice in the modern United States, given the wide separation in space, and hence in time, of the people and the files within the hierarchies and outside. But, as I pointed out in Section II, the ability to compress the flow of time and the span of space is an essential power of

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compunications systems. Marshall McLuhan, speaking of "retrialization of
the modern world" and of "our new electric culture" which "provides our lives
again with a tribal base" (McLuhan, p. 7, p. 32) has popularized these ideas.
In terms more specific to our purpose, Simon speaks of a shift in emphasis
"from the storage of information -- its actual physical possession - to access --
the processes of using information." (Simon lecture)

My first principle increases the practical ability of a President -- and of every other chief in the hierarchy -- himself to choose what information to access personally and what accesses to delegate. It increases his practical ability to tap the most knowledgeable people and the most relevant data that bear on a problem at whatever level in a hierarchy and wherever in the world these might be found. By complementing rather than supplanting or dismantling them, it preserves the normal selection, collation and interpretation functions of the partitioned hierarchies. But it also gives a President the ability to change at will the mix settings in all and only those areas that interest him. He can choose and move deeply into such areas as quickly as his priorities dictate, while leaving others at their normal settings.

My second principle is aimed at truly putting the analysts and the
experts in one branch of the hierarchy in constant touch and interchange with
the people and the data elsewhere in their own and in other hierarchies.
Their responsibility and the focus of their attention remain at their place
in the hierarchy. But they are given unlimited peripheral vision, so to
speak, and thereby the means to avail themselves of relevant expertise or
data, wherever in the hierarchy and in the world these may be. As Indians,
they can therefore be better prepared to volunteer significant data or at
least to respond to requests in more timely and more intelligible fashion than

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under the old ways. As chiefs, they can be better prepared to make those
decisions that lie within the scope of their authority. They can also expect
the same things from their indians.

It is still true, as in the old ways, that if a President does not ask,
he may never know. But the filter settings are now in his hands and his sub-
ordinates are more knowledgeable. His ability to ask anyone in any department
anywhere "the pregnant questions and not be put off by the sterile answers"
(Schlesinger, 1000 Days, p. 422) has been increased and so has the likelihood
that he will get timely and intelligible information from subordinates anywhere
whose comprehension has been deepened. By holding to the fiction that decisions
are dramatic discrete positive acts, the data-processing profession has generally
neglected to account for what in reality is a process spatially diffused through-
out hierarchies, spread out over time, and bathed in a constant flux of change
within the endless chain of cause and effect. As a result, the conventional
emphasis on information systems for chiefs, which is necessarily reflected in
my first principle, is not balanced by an equally necessary concern for the
indians. The dependence of effective indians on their jumpers, stressed in
my second principle, is usually neglected.

Practical objections and objections in principle can easily be raised
against both principles. Deservedly most vulnerable, since my starting point
was the need to help decision-makers, is my assertion that these principles
complement the hierarchies without supplanting or dismantling them. An objec-
tion on this score is therefore unavoidable, I think, however, that there is
no real issue: I am concerned here with the flow of *information* to a President
and to other chiefs in a hierarchy, not with the exercise of his *authority* or
theirs.

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Unfortunately, a widespread confusion of access to information with the exercise of authority beclouds the issue. This confusion is commonly expressed through the aphorism that knowledge is power. In an earlier analysis of management information systems, I explained the distinction: "Clearly, the opening of information lines up, down and across would legitimize a leaping over organizational boundaries that, while essential for real accomplishment, is done nowadays only at official risk and peril. Organization lines reflect lines of authority, but while knowledge is power, the gathering of information is not the exercise of authority. It therefore seems perfectly proper for a manager to leap several levels down in search of answers, or for a subordinate to leap across organizational lines and occasionally over his boss' head so long as decisions and orders travel by normal channels." (Oettinger, 1964) Since a President, or any other chief, however well informed, can rarely carry out his decisions and orders himself, the distinction between access to people and to data and the exercise of authority is, indeed, a distinction with a difference.

In the face of conventional thinking, explaining that there is no real issue or joining the issue may prove equally difficult. Either way, both principles must be asserted, and asserted by the exercise of the full influence of the President, if he is to retain in his own hands as an elected official anything of the vital decisions that the Constitution says are his. Applying traditional leverage over 25 years has not, on the evidence of Sections IV-VI set the mixes in favor of the President. However, communications technology is still a pliable infant, still largely unbound by precedent and with its main period of growth and diffusion still ahead.

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Molding the diffusion of this technology throughout the Executive branch therefore now gives a President an unparalleled opportunity for assuring flexible mixes. This opportunity will never be his again if the old ways get embalmed in the products of communications technology. One reason to hope for the eventual acceptance of both principles by all levels of the hierarchies rests on their common significance to every level, given the dual roles played at every level. Thinking only as a chief, anyone in a hierarchy might accept the first principle but reject the second. Thinking only as an indian, he might resent the first but welcome the second. Thinking as both, he might persuade himself that he stands to gain, as would all other competing chiefs and indians, by accepting both in the national interest.

## IX. The Case for Practicality

It is best to see other and less fundamental objections in the context of a practical example selected both for its acknowledged importance in at least some aspects of national decision-making and for its relative technical simplicity. Months before his trip to Moscow as Vice-President, Nixon "talked for hours with every person [he] could find in Washington who had met and knew Khrushchev" and he "gathered up and tried to absorb every bit of personal information about him which was available." (Nixon, *6 Crises*, p. 254) Knowledge of personalities is equally important at all lower levels of the hierarchies. Concerning such personal information, Sherman Kent has written that "acquiring knowledge of personalities is one of the most important jobs of an intelligence organization. It is also an enormous job ... There must be a wide range of data because there are so many pertinent questions always being asked about people." Therefore, he writes, "the perfect biographical note must include a large amount of cold factual information and a large amount of critical appraisal." (Kent, pp. 140-141) The use of communications technology to handle biographical files of various kinds is already

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widespread both in the government and in the private sector. It will serve
my illustrative purposes best to consider only files assumed to contain, say,
biographies of foreign public figures such as De Gaulle.

Technically, the handling of biographical files by compunications
systems meets the simplest of the requirements stated in Section III. It
can be largely a passive activity in the sense of storing data essentially
as received and passing them on essentially unaltered. Some of Kent's "cold
factual information" might be processed actively, with rudiments of automatic
selection and collation. However, the "critical appraisals" in particular must,
for the foreseeable future, be stored essentially as received and passed on
essentially unaltered. To the extent that biographical processing by compuni-
cations systems is active, it can be treated as a process amenable to arbitrary
conventions more than as an analytic process requiring an extensive theoretical
basis, mainly because the critical appraisals must remain, as before, the work
of knowledgeable people.

Objections based on fear of the centralization of files that might seem
implied in my two principles are one specific embodiment of the objections to
these principles. The fear and the objections stem from confusing access to
information with the exercise of authority. Such objections have undeniable
merit under the old ways, where the physical possession of experts or of files
by someone else's organization means that he can, and usually does, exercise
negative authority by keeping everyone else away from them. Modern compuni-
cations technology, however, provides the means -- and the two principles
provide the will -- to give both indians and chiefs free access to experts
or files wherever they might be located. There being only one DeGaulle, it is
logical that all the information about him be in one place as far as any
inquirer is concerned.

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Who has physical possession of the files from A to E, F to N, and O to Z -- or however else the expertise or the files might be physically fragmented -- is of no more concern to an inquirer than where they are physically located. Once access and dialog proceed by communications, it does not matter whether a response originates next door or from thousands of miles away. It does not matter where a new file entry might end up in physical storage. That phone calls to an airline in Boston might be answered by a clerk in New York or that Enterprise and Area Code 800 calls are not answered locally is something of which most people today are scarcely aware and about which they need care even less.

To whom a chief delegates the physical possession of what fragment of which biographical files and to whom he delegates their maintenance can therefore be determined independently, and mainly in terms of the budget or the prestige of those to whom this matters. Compunications technology thus evaporates the traditional fierce arguments about the centralization or decentralization of experts and files. Moreover, it permits independent resolution of both who should update or query them and who should exercise authority. In particular, therefore, whatever hierarchial partitioning of authority and responsibility is current can be complemented by any degree whatsoever of physical centralization or decentralization of expertise and files. Changes in formal organizational patterns are neighbor demanded nor precluded by technological constraints.

Another argument against the "logical" centralization of files is based on the fear that dumping everything in one common file entry implies some kind of mechanical mangling and homogenization that loses sight of the origin and credibility of the cold factual information or of the authorship of the critical appraisals. Some of this fear reflects genuine concern over enforced anonymity

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and loss of credit for personal contributions. Such fears are groundless in a well designed communications system. Computer files lend themselves admirably to exquisitely detailed annotations of sources and of authors, and the pedigree of every last bit of data in a file entry can be traced unto the Nth ancestral generation. Only the budget need limit the detail of pedigrees.

Hence there can be ample information to meet a President's or any other chief or indian's concern over where either the cold facts or the critical appraisals came from. Suppose that a summary critical appraisal of some personality comes to the attention of the President and that he suspects it of having been reduced to a lowest common denominator of agreement by the conventional coordinating machinery. The communications system gives him the option of tracing it back almost instantaneously to the underlying critical appraisals made by different departments and more important, even to the original authors of these appraisals. He can trace it personally, if he puts a high premium on no filtering whatever, or he can ask one or more of his staff to do the tracing for him. The availability of such comparisons can also help all other chiefs and indians in making useful jumpers to the authors of particularly informative or perceptive appraisals. In critical cases, the President himself or his staff can evaluate disagreements by tracing, if necessary, right back to original raw data, in order to distinguish quickly between differing professional assessments of data with the same pedigree, and assessments based on different raw data. With access to raw data, line or staff might also, in critical cases, think through how arguments for an opposing point of view might be supported, thereby sharpening their own thinking or preparing their principal with predictions of points he will be called upon to resolve.

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Not only can a communications system keep track of the pedigree of every entry in a file, but it can also keep track of every inquiry to each entry. The pedigree of inquiries addressed to a biographical entry or to its ancestors routinely provides a clear path to more than one individual, more than one department, more than one point of view. That someone else has made inquiries at the same source as yourself is evidence of some kindred interests. This someone is a likely source of correlative expertise and data that might well be overlooked under the old ways. This is particularly valuable if the other inquirer turns out to be an analyst deep in the hierarchy who has made it his business to keep track of the biographee's relation to his analytical specialty and if that specialty turns out to be germane to the problem at hand. Finding such paths requires extraordinary action under the old ways.

A big chief may well wish to delegate the details of such tracings to others but, under the two principles, the option is entirely his. In routine crises, any chief's information overload is minimized by the normal settings of the mixes, with reliance on data and interpretations filtered by line and staff as they rise upward from the lower compartments. In extraordinary crises, the tracing facilities provide the flexibility necessary to find and use data as general or as picayune as needed and the people capable of assisting with timely and intelligible interpretations.

The fact that communications technology still faces its main period of growth and diffusion gives a President a unique opportunity to tailor the secrecy of a new system to a measure determined by his needs, by the demands of the separation of powers among the three branches of our government, and by public rights to information. The assertion of the two principles and their application to new communications systems in the Executive branch is essential if the abuse of secrecy and the endless compartmented accumulation of facts

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is to give way to a system more responsive to the needs of a President and of
all subordinate indians and chiefs for timely and comprehensive knowledge.
Otherwise, the hierarchies will find it easy to let the secrecy patterns of
new systems simply reflect the old ways, for communications systems can lend
themselves as easily to stifling the sharing of knowledge as to encouraging it.

Tailoring secrecy need not imply condoning indiscretions. Quite to the
contrary, the gargantuan clerical prowess of communications systems even now
enables the screening of inquirers according to time-worn criteria of need-to-
know, affiliation or rank that reinforce the old ways. We must start from the
premise that the refusal of access and not the right of access to information
is what requires administrative or legislative justification, and then tailor
screening techniques for new systems to guard only against indiscretions, not
to permit the old ways to throttle the new principles in their cradle.

The two principles are open to objections on further practical technical
grounds. For example, filing practices throughout government and industry now
differ from one office to another, and it is safe to assume that no two bio-
graphical files within the Executive branch have formats that are identical in
every respect or are updated according to precisely the same discipline.
Reconciling such differences is a formidable task under the old ways. Apparently
petty matters, like the use of index cards of different sizes (won't fit each
other's file drawers), the use of 25 and not 30 columns of a punched card to
record a name (the cards won't go through each other's card readers), trans-
literation as Tchaikovsky versus transliteration as Chajkovskij (where is it
in the file?) and so on can be presented as evidence of the insuperable dif-
ficulties of cooperation.

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Most of these differences disappear with modern communications technology. The index is inside a computer not on file cards, the computer need not care how many columns are assigned to a name, it can be made to translate from one transliteration scheme to another and it can help group together all residents at the same address with the same last name, even if this takes occasional human intervention to assure that J. J. Smith and J. Jacob Smith are the indeed same but both distinct from J. J. Smyth. A seemingly comical residue of interminable squabbles on such petty subjects can be observed in most organizations. It is a dead serious manifestation of that immersion in preparations which Neustadt has recognized as an effective substitute for an overt refusal to act.

## X. In The Beginning ...

Biographical files are but one example of the areas in which communications systems can give new flexibility to decision makers here and now, given the will to make the institutional changes implicit in my two principles. Systems which are, like biographical files, based on arbitrary but generally accepted conventions lack the glamour of the modelling systems described as the second category in Section III. It can be argued, with some justice, that decision-makers need macroeconomic models, or at least, budget control and prediction mechanisms, more than they need electronic file cabinets.

Biographical files are, as we have seen in Section VII, as important to chiefs as to indians. In other cases, data that can be dealt with effectively by systems based on arbitrary conventions admittedly will assist little indians more directly than big chiefs, at least initially. But even initially, what helps to make a little indian more knowledgeable also helps every big chief in the same endless chain, especially if the indian is accessible to the chief through modern communications facilities, as can be the case right now.

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Still more important, modelling systems are consumers of raw data, as I have pointed out in Section III. Their practical value, I said, depends on the quality and quantity of data that can be put at their disposal. Beginning with systems like biographical files has the intrinsic merit of providing some assistance for decision makers of all levels here and now. It also is an absolutely necessary step in the research and development needed to take modelling systems out of the world of the purely quantitative or of the purely speculative and to bring them to help the real world.

All the wild promises of the technicians and the salesmen for the immediate realization of long-term possibilities are the old ways' best friends. By promising the blue sky and demeaning the practical first step, they cloak the immense power of sitting still with the appearance of strenuous striving. What they automate is immersion in preparation. Delays to protect the old ways can no longer be tolerated. The bases for Neustadt's conclusion that "as a matter ... of preserving the essentials in our democratic order, a President these days is virtually compelled to reach for information and to seek control over details of operations deep inside executive departments" seem unchanged today.

Under the old ways, limitations of time, space and hierarchy curtail his access to information and induce unwanted delegations of his constitutional responsibilities. The effective use of communications systems offers a new way, likely the only way, to preserve this aspect of the essentials in our democratic order.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buchwald, Art (1969) "Why not elect a computer to lead us?"
The Boston Globe, March 20, p. 19.

Guthrie, Chester L. and Thomas R. Kennedy (1969) "Informing the Nation's President" Advanced Management Journal, Vol. 34, No. 1, January.

Hoopes, Townsend (1969) "The Fight for the President's Mind"
The Atlantic, October.

Kemeny, John G. (1969) "Large Time Sharing Networks"
this series, September 11.

Kennedy, Robert F. (1969) Thirteen Days, Signet Q3905, The New American Library, New York.

Kent, Sherman (1965) Strategic Intelligence, Archon Books, Hamden, Connecticut.

McLuhan, Marshall (1962) The Gutenberg Galaxy, University of Toronto Press.

Neustadt, Richard E. (1964) Presidential Power, Mentor MT708, The New American Library, New York.

Nixon, Richard M. (1968) Six Crises, Pyramid N-1933, Pyramid Publications, New York.

Nixon, Richard M. (1969) "Statement by the President on the Establishment of a National Goals Research Staff", Office of the White House Press Secretary, for release July 13.

Oettinger, Anthony G. (1964) "A Bull's Eye View of Management and Engineering Information Systems" Proceedings of the 19th ACM National Conference, Association for Computing Machinery, New York. Reprinted in Alan Westin, Information Technology in a Democracy, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts (in press).

Oettinger, Anthony G. (1969) Run, Computer, Run, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Pueblo (1969) Inquiry into the U.S.S. Pueblo and EC-121 Plane Incidents
Report of the Special Subcommittee on the U.S.S. Pueblo of the
Committee on Armed Services, House of Representatives, Ninety-First
Congress, First Session. July 28.

Raborn, William F. (1966) "Interview with Admiral William F. Raborn, Retiring Head of America's Most Secret Agency" U.S. News and World Report, July 18.

Ransom, Harry Howe (1958) Central Intelligence and National Security,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY - (Continued)

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. (1965) *A Thousand Days*, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Schlesinger, Arthur M., Jr. (1959) *The Coming of the New Deal*, Houghton Mifflin, Boston.

Simon, Herbert (1969) "Designing Organizations for an Information-Rich World" -- this series, October 9.

Wilensky, Harold L. (1967) *Organizational Intelligence*, Basic Books, New York.

Anthony G. Oettinger is Professor of Linguistics, Gordon McKay Professor of Applied Mathematics and Research Associate to the Program on Technology and Society at Harvard University. As a consultant to Arthur D. Little, Inc. since 1956, he has worked with management information systems in the banking, securities, insurance, railroad, communications and other industries; while on leave with Bellcomm, Inc. in 1963-64, he became familiar with the management systems of NASA's manned space flight program; as a consultant to the Office of Science and Technology, Executive Office of the President, he has worked on information problems in the Executive branch of the United States Government.

He has also served as chairman of the Harvard University Computing Center and as president of the Association for Computing Machinery. Currently he is the chairman of the Computer Science and Engineering Board of the National Academy of Sciences and director of Project TACT (Technological Aids to Creative Thought), sponsored at Harvard University by the National Science Foundation.

He is the author of *Automatic Language Translation: Lexical and Technical Aspects*, of *Run, Computer, Run: The Mythology of Educational Innovation* and of numerous papers on the computer sciences and their applications.