Subject: Peter Drucker on Computers (1969) [long]
From: [email-masked] (Jim Haynes)
Newsgroups: alt.quotations,alt.folklore.computers

Peter Drucker - 1969

	The computer came on the scene in the late 1940's and,
despite all the talk about how fast things go today, we have not yet
got an information industry.  What we need is not going to be a
physical object.  It is going to be what is called software - the
concepts, the ideas, the logic.  There also has to be a lot of peripheral
and transmitting and receiving and sending equipment that will make the
computer a tool one can use, which it is not today.  So far the main
impact of the computer has been the creation of unlimited employment
opportunities for clerks.  this is not great progress.  But we are
coming very close to the point where we will have an information
industry.  The pieces are probably all there: the communications
satellite and the television screen and the duplicating machine and
the fast printer.
	What we lack primarily are large concepts which will enable people
to use the machine.  It will not really become usable as long as we make
the asinine attempt to have the computer speak English, which it cannot
do.  In music, the difference between East and West is the fact that
many centuries ago St. Ambrose invented notation.  Up to that time music
was described in words, as it still is in the East, which means you
cannot have ensemble music, you cannot have keys, and you have to
memorize.  But we all expect seven-year-olds to learn notation in two
weeks, and most of them can do it.
	We are beginning to learn notation which will essentailly
enable anybody to use the computer without that unspeakably clumsy,
slow, and expensive "programming" or translation job.  The proper
notation, which will enable us to use an electronic medium electronically,
rather than trying to use bastard language that it cannot handle and
we cannot handle, is perhaps ten years away.
	The future manager will find the computer as much a new fact of
life as children today find the telephone.  This is a new form of energy:
information is energy for the mind.  What should the manager try to
do with it?  The first question is, Does it free you?  Does it enable
you to spend less and less time controlling and more and more time doing
the important things?  If the result of the computer is that you pore
over more records, you are abusing it or you are being abused by it.
Then you have less control, incidentally: control is not an abundance
of facts, but knowing what facts to have and what they mean.
	If it enables you to spend no time controlling operations,
because you have thought through what you expect - and, if what
you expect does not happen, you know immediately, but, so long as
it does happen, you do not have to worry very much - then you are
using the computer properly.  The first test is, How many hours outside
the office does the computer give you?  In the office, you are cost-
centered and not result-centered.  The computer is a tool of liberation
if used correctly.  Otherwise, you become its servant.  It should
liberate you from being chained to operations and to your desk and
enable you to have time for people and for the outside, where the
results are.
	The second test is, Are you using it to enable the people
in your organization to do what they are ostensibly being paid for?
Or are you using it to make it even easier for them to do everything
except what they are being paid for?  There used to be very little
choice, but there is no reason for this any more - if you instruct
your systems and computer people properly, instead of having them
tell you what they should focus on, which is invariably the payroll.
Nobody had any difficulty in getting out the payroll before the
computer; so use it for the payroll, but do not believe that it
is very much of an advance to do the unnecessary three times as
fast.
	[He goes on to suggest that sales is the area that most
needs information processing, because the best sales people are
the worst at paper work.  The time they have to spend on paper work
is time they could be using to sell.]
	Ask "What are the areas where handling data has become
an end in itself and has been allowed to overgrow the job?"  That
is where the data processing people had better go to work.  Then
ask "What are the repetitive crises that really sidetrack the whole
organization again and again?"  Is it the annual inventory battle, of
which I take a dim view?  Or other repetitive crises that really
should not happen - things that we have not really thought through,
that we have not anticipated?  At least now we can build early warning
into the system.
	So these are the instructions I give to my computer people.
I say, "By now, children, you have learned how to do payroll; you
may even have learned how to do credit; you may even have learned
how to follow an order through the plant so that one can coordinate
plant scheduling with shipping and customer promises." (Although
that is something everybody says he has done, I have yet to see
anybody who really has.) "Fine.  You have learned how to do large-
scale clerical work.  Now I want you to start working on information."