Information and the Modern Corporation

While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and Google's ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and analyze information (often in digital form) to do their jobs. This book offers a guide to the role of information in modern business, mapping the use of information within work processes, tracing flows of information across supply-chain management, product development, customer relations, and sales. The emphasis is on information itself, not information technology. Information, overshadowed for a while by the glamour and novelty of IT, is the fundamental component of the modern corporation. In Information and the Modern Corporation, longtime IBM manager and consultant James Cortada clarifies the differences among data, facts, information, and knowledge and describes 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 given topic becomes their medium of exchange. Information is the core of the modern enterprise, and the use of information defines the activities of a firm. Cortada's essential guide shows managers and employees better ways to leverage information--by design and not by accident.

James W. Cortada is Senior Research Fellow at the Charles Babbage Institute at the University of Minnesota and the author of Information and the Modern Corporation (MIT Press) and other books. He worked at IBM for thirty-eight years in sales, consulting, managerial, and research positions.