Information and the Modern Corporation

While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google'songoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms andindustries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workerscollect and analyze information (often in digital form) in the course of doing their jobs. This bookoffers a guide to the role of information in modern business, mapping the use of information withinwork processes and tracing flows of information across supply-chain management, product development,customer relations, and sales. The emphasis is on information itself, not on information technology.Information, overshadowed for a while by the glamour and novelty of IT, is the fundamental componentof the modern corporation. In Information and the Modern Corporation, longtime IBM manager andconsultant James Cortada clarifies the differences among data, facts, information, and knowledge anddescribes how the art of analytics has all but eliminated decision making based on gut feeling,replacing it with fact-based decisions. He describes the working style of "road warriors,"whose offices are anywhere their laptops and cell phones are and whose deep knowledge of a giventopic becomes their medium of exchange. Information is the core of the modern enterprise, and theuse of information defines the activities of a firm. This essential guide shows managers andemployees better ways to leverage information--by design and not by accident.

James W. Cortada has worked at IBM for more than thirty-five years in various sales, consulting, and managerial positions. He currently works in IBM's core business research center, the Institute for Business Value. He is the author of many books, including Making the Information Society, The Digital Hand, and How Societies Embrace Information Technology.