MIT Sloan Management Review

Leadership and Organizational Studies, Management of Technology and Innovation

 

Information Politics

By Thomas H. Davenport, Robert G. Eccles and Laurence Prusak

October 15, 1992

INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY WAS SUPPOSED TO STIMULATE INFORMATION FLOW AND ELIMINATE HIERARCHY. IT HAS HAD JUST THE OPPOSITE EFFECT, ARGUE THE authors. As information has become the key organizational “currency,” it has become too valuable for most managers to just give away. In order to make information-based organizations successful, companies need to harness the power of politics — that is, allow people to negotiate the use and definition of information, just as we negotiate the exchange of other currencies. The authors describe five models of information politics and discuss how companies can move from the less effective models, like feudalism and technocratic utopianism, and toward the more effective ones, like monarchy and federalism.

Buy article & permissions

“Information is not innocent.”—James March1

During the past decade, many firms have concluded that information is one of their most critical business resources and that broadening information access and usage and enhancing its quality are key to improving business performance. The “information-based organization,” the “knowledge-based enterprise,” and the “learning organization,” forecasted by management experts, all require a free flow of information around the firm.2 The computers and communications networks that manipulate and transmit information become more powerful each year. Yet the rhetoric and technology of information management have far outpaced the ability of people to understand and agree on what information they need and then to share it.

Today, in fact, the information-based organization is largely a fantasy. All of the writers on information-based organizations must speak hypothetically, in the abstract, or in the future tense. Despite forty years of the Information Revolution in business, most managers still tell us that they cannot get the information they need to run their own units or functions. As a recent article by the CEO of a shoe company put it: “On one of my first days on the job, I asked for a copy of every report used in management. The next day, twenty-three of them appeared on my desk. I didn’t understand them. . . . Each area’s reports were greek... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.

 
 

In This Issue

 

Best Sellers