Writing on the introduction of computing to organizational decision making in the late 1940s as WWII was still active, Joseph Weizenbaum addresses the tautology that computers insinuate themselves into, that they become the indispensable tools that keep highly complex activities running. He writes:
"The computer was not a prerequisite to the survival of modern society in the postwar period and beyond; its enthusiastic, uncritical embrace by the most 'progressive' elements of American government, business, and industry quickly made it a resource essential to society's survival in the form that the computer itself had been instrumental in shaping." (pp. 28-29)
Weizenbaum speaks of the speed and complexity with which organizations were using information and the decisions they made based upon it. He cites a memorandum by J. W. Forrester to the U.S. Navy, explaining that "'regardless of the assumed advantages of human judgment decision, the internal communication speed of the human organization simply was not able to cope with the pace of modern air warfare'" (as cited by Wiesenbaum, 1976, p. 29). In reflection, Weizenbaum denotes how the necessity of computers avoided a different decision: to either do away with the kinds of decisions being carried out or to restructure organizations to better meet the needs to make them. Computer adoption offered an incentive to, instead, preserve the kinds of centralized collection, planning, and decision making occurring within the military in the 1950s. The computer essentially preserved the power of centralized social and political organizations by allowing them not to delegate decisions to smaller organizational units better located and more attuned to local decision making. He writes:
"Yes, the computer did arrive 'just in time.' But in time for what? In time to save--and save very nearly intact, indeed, to entrench, and stabilize--social and political structures that otherwise might have been either radically renovated or allowed to totter under the demands that were sure to be made on them. The computer, then, was used to conserve America's social and political institutions. It buttressed them and immunized them, at least temporarily, against enormous pressures for change." (p. 31)
The spread of computerization to other organizations would follow in the coming years and decades. Weizenbaum notes that it was during these initial business systems analyses the decision to adopt computers could have been avoided.
"During the first decade of the computer's serious invasion of business, when managers often decided their businesses needed computers even though they had only the flimsiest bases for such decisions, they also often undertook fairly penetrating systems analyses of their operations in order to determine what their new computers were to do. In a great many cases such studies revealed opportunities to improve operations, sometimes radically, without introducing computers at all. Nor were computers used in the studies themselves. Often, of course, computers were installed anyway for reasons of, say, fashion or prestige." (p. 34)
This characterization of computer introduction into organizations suggests that the act of computer adoption, as part and parcel of 'the computer revolution' was not revolutionary at all. On the contrary, it conserved power by at the very least offering the illusion of speedy and effective decisions based upon feeding more and varied data points into programs centrally controlled instead of spreading decision making out into specialized groups and even inventing whole new organizations to meet new demands. Instead, the pyramid-structure organization was breathed new life by placing the computer at its apex.
From Joseph Weizenbaum's "Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation"
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