Inventing Information Systems

by Thomas Haigh

Image courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

During the late 1950s and early 1960s, a new and exciting concept swept through corporate America: the "totally integrated management information system" (MIS)—a comprehensive computerized system designed to span all administrative and managerial activities. While the lower levels of this gargantuan information system would process the payroll and bill customers, its upper levels would provide executives with constantly updated forecasts and models of their company's market position. MIS promised a new vision of management to a corporate world self-consciously remaking itself around science, high technology, staff experts, and systems. The idea of MIS was spread by the "systems men" of the Systems and Procedures Association—an alliance of staff specialists in administrative methods, management consultants, and business professors, who were all seeking to legitimate themselves as technical experts in management. The elite of this systems movement devised the MIS concept during the late 1950s, thereby linking the computer to their existing claims to systems expertise. Its rank-and-file members (mostly corporate staff specialists) accepted information systems as their new raison d'etre during the early 1960s.  1

Many of the largest American firms began to use computers to automate their most routine administrative processes during the late 1950s. A decade later, the systems men's labors had dramatically changed accepted wisdom on the correct use of computers. In the process, the systems and procedures department was essentially merged with the computer department, and the corporate systems analyst became a computer specialist. The computer's proper role had been transformed, rhetorically at least, from a simple clerk-replacing processor of data into a mighty information system sitting at the very heart of management serving executives with vital intelligence about every aspect of their firm's past, present, and future. Its contribution could be evaluated not primarily in terms of administrative cost savings but through improved performance of the entire business. And, far from coincidentally, the creators of such systems would have to work closely with executives, assert broad authority over management of the firms' operations, and assemble battalions of analysts, programmers, modelers, and other experts under their command.  2

The systems men were but one of many groupings of technical staff experts that proliferated within American business corporations following the Second World War. In order to legitimate their authority, these experts had to assert centralized corporate control over activities previously performed by divisional line managers. Like scientists and engineers, the systems men claimed to possess a body of objective knowledge and techniques qualifying them to make superior decisions within a particular technical domain. But their task of legitimization was uniquely difficult because their claimed domain was management itself. To succeed, they had to shift the barriers between "the technical" and "the managerial" erected during the early twentieth century to protect and demarcate managerial authority from that of engineers. The authority of the engineer had been confined to a technical sphere—he or she might one day advance to executive status, but only by shedding one identity and assuming another.  3

Image courtesy of the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis

The beauty of MIS was that it tied together a whole set of operations that general managers already thought were important (such as reporting, financial controls, and production scheduling) and bound them to the exciting but disruptive technology of the computer, thus blurring distinctions between the technical and the managerial. It achieved several goals at once. First, by identifying the computer as a tool for the construction of management information systems, it established the jurisdiction of the systems men over the burgeoning world of corporate computing. Second, the new emphasis on the provision of information and control to top management furthered the long-standing quest of the systems men for recognition by executives as more than just clerical specialists and narrow technicians. Third, the new analytical category of management information lumped together certain domains that the systems men had previously been reasonably successful in asserting control over (such as forms, office machines, and clerical procedures) with a host of others that they aspired to control (such as management reports, organizational restructuring, and strategic planning). Systems men hoped that acceptance of the MIS concept would help them transform their success with the more mundane aspects of information systems into a much broader mandate to act as what a few pioneering authors called "information engineers."  4

	They aspired to true managerial power as the trusted assistants and advisors of top management.
	— Thomas Haigh

For about a decade, from its introduction in 1959 to the end of the 1960s, this very broad definition of MIS spread rapidly and was endorsed by industrial corporations, consultants, academic researchers, management writers, and computer manufacturers. Only during this era and in this context was the now commonplace concept of information as a distinct, abstract, yet universal and impersonal, quantity first established in business culture. But the "totally integrated" information systems originally envisioned proved impossible to construct, leading to some public retreats toward the end of the 1960s. In the 1970s, MIS was redefined in many different ways by these various constituencies, each reflecting a part of the original vision. Grand definitions were gradually given up in the face of experience, and though the term became, if anything, more common during the 1980s, it shed these now embarrassing associations with the youthful optimism of corporate computing. Despite this, the vision of the computer and information systems as central to a new approach to management has endured to the present. So has the close linkage of information with the computer, the identification of the computer expert as an information specialist, and the paradoxical situation that information is at once the mundane stuff processed in massive volumes by computers, a readily available commodity that permeates the Internet, and the vital resource that powers managerial decision making and corporate success.

Introducing the Systems Men
Economic mobilization during the Second World War brought an incredible increase in industrial output and placed a premium on the integrated planning of production and distribution. Work simplification plans, printed forms, organizational charts, process charts, and instruction manuals were produced for use on an unprecedented scale. This wartime experience impressed many administrators with what could be accomplished when organizational structures and procedures were carefully crafted to achieve specific ends, rather than accreting slowly over time. In 1944, a number of these administrators met in Philadelphia and began the process of setting up a new organization that would further the acceptance of modern administrative techniques. The Systems and Procedures Association of America (SPA) received its charter in 1947. The members of the association called themselves the "systems men." Its leadership saw the systems men as the vanguard of a broader systems movement within corporate administration, intended to bring the proven methods of Frederick W. Taylor, industrial engineering, and the new "management science" to the neglected and sleepy world of white-collar work. They considered themselves administrative generalists—indeed, "systems man" served as an overarching identity that subsumed existing specialties. They aspired to true managerial power as the trusted assistants and advisors of top management.

Their systems movement took place largely within the society of corporate management. It was concerned above all with the establishment of the systems and procedures department as a respected, autonomous, and well-funded staff group that could sweep away antiquated methods and spread efficient practices throughout the firm. The papers presented at their International Systems meetings, which were published in the magazine Systems & Procedures Quarterly, exhibit a fixation on questions of status and power: what the group should be named; to whom its leaders should report; how large should it be; what work should it undertake; and how top management could be convinced of its utility. Following the war, American business experienced a sustained and rapid boom. As companies merged, diversified, and set up international subsidiaries, the multidivisional decentralized structure, once confined to a handful of giant enterprises, became the dominant corporate model. Growth, reorganization, and the separation of divisional line operations from corporate staff activities provided a nurturing environment for the new function to take hold.

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Thomas Haigh is a Ph.D. candidate in the History and Sociology of Science Department of the University of Pennsylvania.

From Business History Review

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