Network Logic - Index of
Network Logic - Index of
Network Logic - Index of
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Organising for success<br />
This is a pr<strong>of</strong>ound management challenge. In theory, the new<br />
information and communications technologies permit any employee<br />
<strong>of</strong> a business to have real-time access to all kinds <strong>of</strong> information that<br />
would allow her or him to make better – more pr<strong>of</strong>itable – decisions.<br />
But very few companies indeed take advantage <strong>of</strong> this possibility. The<br />
evidence is, though, that all the productivity gains from the<br />
technologies are concentrated among companies that have undergone<br />
organisational change. No change, no gain – but if work is<br />
reorganised, the level <strong>of</strong> productivity in the business can jump by 25<br />
or 30 per cent according to case study evidence. 4 Such figures are a<br />
measure <strong>of</strong> how much consumers are willing to pay for improved<br />
quality and customisation.<br />
The transition from the type <strong>of</strong> company and employment<br />
relationship we have now to the type suggested by the logic <strong>of</strong> a freeinformation<br />
world is going to be at least as radical – and as slow – as<br />
the shift from Victorian entrepreneurialism to 1950s corporatism.<br />
And yet the logic is there. With the average company life now down to<br />
under 20 years, any business that can trace its roots back to the<br />
nineteenth century and which hopes to survive through the twentyfirst<br />
century should start struggling with it now.<br />
Diane Coyle runs Enlightenment Economics and is a visiting pr<strong>of</strong>essor at<br />
Manchester University’s Institute for Political and Economic<br />
Governance. She is the author <strong>of</strong>, among other books, Paradoxes <strong>of</strong><br />
Prosperity and The Weightless World.<br />
Notes<br />
1 B van Ark and E Monnikh<strong>of</strong>, ‘Size distribution <strong>of</strong> output and employment: a<br />
data set for five OECD countries 1960s–1990’, Economics Department Working<br />
Paper no 166 (Paris: OECD, 1996).<br />
2 E Brynjolfsson, MD Smith and Y Hu, ‘Consumer surplus in the digital<br />
economy: estimating the value <strong>of</strong> increased product variety at online<br />
booksellers’, MIT Working Paper, April (2003).<br />
3 C Sheerin, ‘UK material flow accounting’, Economic Trends 583, June (2002).<br />
4 See, for example, T Bresnahan, E Brynjolfsson and L Hitt, ‘IT, workplace<br />
organisation and the demand for skilled labor: a firm-level analysis’, MIT<br />
Working Paper (2002); E Brynjolfsson and L Hitt, ‘Paradox lost? Firm-level<br />
Demos 175