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Origins of The New Bureaucracy ASI
conference, Utrecht. S Y L LAB U S ASI-leergang
"SOFTWARE-CRISIS" 30
september en 1 oktober 1982 [For more details on the conference, go to
bottom.] THE
NEW BUREAUCRACY Ivor Catt St, Albans ENGLAND August 1982 Abstract. Three
anti-technology forces in society are now coming together and uniting under
the banner of software in their rearguard battle against the rising power of
technology and the technocracy. These forces are, first, the bureaucracy;
second, management; and third, the pure scientist. What is
the nature of the relationship between the manager and the technocrat? Do
they, hand in hand, mutually trusting, mutually supporting, venture bravely
into a prosperous future? Does the manager never doubt his technocrat's
loyalty? Does the technocrat never doubt his manager's loyalty? My
twenty years experience in ten companies in Britain and the U.S.A. indicates
that there is deep hostility and fear between manager and technocrat.
Currently the manager holds the upper hand and fights a nervous rearguard
action against the rising technocrat. In the
early days, a factory was owned by the man who managed it, controlled it and
understood all the details of its operation. Later in the industrial
revolution, business and industry became larger and more complex, and the
owners began to lose detailed knowledge of their operation. The introduction
of the joint stock limited liability company allowed ownership to be fully
divorced from understanding. A professional managerial class developed which
knew all the details and was therefore able to make the crucial decisions. Power
passed from the owners to the management, because as J.K. Galbraith says in
'The New Industrial State; power is where the most complex decision making
is. Whereas nominally the owners, the stockholders, still had control, in
reality because of their ignorance they could only 'ratify' decisions made by
the management. In his book 'The Practice of Management' Peter Drucker
describes how Henry Ford behaved like an industrial Canute when he tried to
keep power out of the hands of his professional management, virtually
bankrupting his company in the process. Today, as Henry Ford showed,
stockholders can only obstruct the actions of a company's management, nothing
more. The
latest shift is in high technology industry, where the most complex problems
and decisions are technological, so that power should now move from
management to the technocracy. We can see bitter battles during the transfer
of power, re-enacting what occurred in the Ford company during the previous
transfer of control from owner to manager. For example, during my first year
[1968] in one computer company [which designed, manufactured and sold computers],
all employees within the design department who had more than four years of
design experience were driven out of the company. Also, it was common to
categorise all engineers above a certain level of qualification and
experience as temporary (contract engineers), the idea being that a manager
can have someone working for him at more than his own salary provided he is
described as temporary. The
generally near-bankrupt condition of most high technology industries can be
attributed to the Canute-like rearguard action by management against a new
rising power elite, the technocracy. This bankruptcy is both financial and
technological. High technology industry not only loses money at an
unprecedented rate; it also fails to innovate to any significant degree. We
must look through the barrage of propaganda to the reality in order to see
this. The
Henry Ford syndrome affected only some companies during the previous transfer
of power. The reason why the present transfer from management to technocracy
is so much more acrimonious is because management, already badly paid in
Britain, look forward to a greatly circumscribed role in the future, short on
money and prestige; very much the role of the doorman at the swank hotel. According
to Galbraith, after a transfer of power to the new group who make the most
complex decisions, the old, declining group can only act obstructively. For
example, Henry Ford obstructed the work of his rising managerial class.
Today, similarly, the declining managerial class obstructs the work of the
rising technocracy. In the
past, management would wax enthusiastic about simplistic pseudo-technical
questions - for instance the alleged brilliance of the technically ignorant
Weinstock, head of G.E.C., Britain's biggest high technology company, when he
demanded of his chief engineer that he reduce the number of valves (tubes) in
the television they manufactured from three to two. As background to the
story, it did not need to be said that the chief engineer, being technical,
would not know, firstly that two valves cost less than three, and secondly that
a cheaper television would sell better. Onto
the scene of this rearguard battle comes software, a simplistic new
pseudo-technology with no technical content, administered by programmers who
are as ignorant as management when it comes to engineering. (Virtually no
so-called 'computer science' degree courses in Britain contain any physics or
engineering.) The arrival of software is a heaven-sent aid to management in
its battle to limit the work of the technocracy, particularly because
software, the modern clerk's job, is in fact low level management work. It is
in the interest of both management and of programmers to play down and limit
technology, and they do this by developing the myth that software is
technical, possibly the new technology, putting around such false phrases as
"software engineering", "information technology",
although software has no engineering content and the information industry has
no technical content, and employs almost exclusively programmers with no
knowledge of engineering or even of school physics. It is a
simple matter for the new management-programmer axis to ensure that no new
product will be allowed which does not contain at its centre a general
purpose (Von Neumann) computer, so ensuring that every product or activity in
the future will mimic the data processing systems of the past on which both
today's manager and today's programmer cut their teeth. As the cost of such a
machine falls, the technically ignorant programmer, egged on by the
technically ignorant manager, infiltrates deeper and deeper into the work of
the engineer and freezes it into one particular structure - a structure which
is very expensive in software overhead, is very unreliable, and also runs
very slowly. Since the machine runs slowly, having at its core a slow
microprocessor, more and more engineering activity has to be off line rather
than real time, and the divorce from physical reality, always the objective
of the bureaucrat, gathers pace. As in the past the bureaucrat would function
in a false, simplistic model of reality, so the new, slow, off line machine
functions in a false, simplistic model of reality. Pressure is then put on
reality to conform, and this pressure is exerted by programmers without
knowledge of reality, that is, without knowledge of physics or engineering. Software
is the weapon which the bureaucracy uses to infiltrate into the heart of
technology in order to control it and stop it from developing. In
Britain, after many years of inaction, the government recently pumped large
amounts of money into what it called 'the microelectronics revolution'. All
of this money has now been subverted into teaching a whole generation how to
program, always in the language called 'Basic', which is the language most
far divorced even from the reality of the old Von Neumann computer. None of
the government subsidy to our industry found its way into hardware or
engineering. Most of
you will not know what I mean by 'Von Neumann Computer'. It means a machine
where one instruction is obeyed at a time and the use of content addressable
memories, also called associative memories, is not allowed. [Bringing this up to date, processing
within memory is not allowed. Ivor Catt 18oct02.] Most of you will not know what a content addressable memory is.
It is a memory where you can call up words of a certain type, rather than, as
in R.A.M., having to call for a word by its physical location. Most
software techniques turn out to be devices to make up for the lack of a
content addressable memory [refusal
to allow parallel processing within memory]. In the
1940's, unlike today, it was technically very difficult to build a content addressable
memory [or an array processor],
so the Von Neumann team did not include one in their machine. Today we refuse
to use them because the ancients did not use them. So far,
we have seen that the bureaucracy and also management in industry join forces
with software in order to subvert and control technology and stop it from
advancing. Up to
the present time another quite distinct battle has been fought between the
pure scientist and the technocrat. You will all be familiar with this battle,
between sacred scientific search after truth on the one hand and profane
technological search after profit on the other. In the range from sacred to
profane, pure mathematics stands at the most sacred end of the spectrum, then
comes applied math, then physics, then engineering. Now the mathematician,
being divorced from the profit motive, found it difficult to make a living.
However, a decade or two ago, some of these technology free individuals
stooped to programming in order to earn a crust. They discovered that a lack
of knowledge of physics and engineering was no handicap, that programming had
no technical content, so, reassured, they called themselves 'computer
scientists' (although programming is not a science) and talked about such
things as 'cybernetics', the 'information revolution', and so forth. Without
realising it, they were exploiting the fact that the limited technologies of
the 1940's and 1950's had led to a very awkward machine, the Von Neumann
computer, which required the services of large numbers of clerics
(programmers) to get useful work out of it. The
fact that out of work mathematicians took up programming meant that software
ended up on the side of pure science in its century old battle against
profane applied science. Programmers
managed to get inside the colleges in Britain and the U.S.A., something
digital electronics has still today failed to do [still true in 2002] , and set up
departments in what they called 'computer science', which must be a false
name because in such departments no science or computer hardware is taught,
only programming. Further, entrants to such university departments are not
required to have any qualification in physics or engineering. In
Britain, the bureaucracy is populated at its upper levels by the old pre-industrial
ruling class, and by tradition they despise management in industry. However,
the class origins of the bureaucracy are widening, and both the bureaucracy
and management in industry see software as a useful weapon to fend off the
growth of technology. Software
unites three previously separate groups, the bureaucracy, management, and the
pure scientist, all of whom are opposed to technology. If we
want to prevent such a powerful anti-technology axis to develop, we must
ensure that at least the upper levels in the programming industry have some
knowledge of technology so that they will come to think in terms of using it
rather than merely fear it as a threat. In the British context, this would be
achieved by legislating against any college giving a degree in 'computer
science' if the course contained no scientific or technological material, as
is the case in virtually all computer science degrees today. There is no
possibility that the present industry, containing as it does personnel 98% of
whom have no knowledge of technology, will be able to exploit the gigantic
potential of digital electronics into the future The nature of information. In 1964
Marshall McLuhan discussed the massive increase in the flow of electronic
information, and developed the idea that in the future this information would
be an important commodity to be bought, sold and processed. For him,
information was any signal of any kind. However, today, the so-called
'information industry' restricts information to verbal information, a sequence
of words and numbers. This restriction in the type of information we are
willing to handle cuts us off from the massive potential service that digital
electronics offers us. To
illustrate the point, I shall ask a question. Let us suppose that an aircraft
is flying along, sending out radar pulses which bounce off other aircraft, or
off the ground, and return. Are the returning pulses information? If they
are, if follows that an 'information technologist' or 'computer scientist'
must be qualified in technology, or the industry will not be able to relate
to its potential. If however the returning pulses are not information, then
we need to set up a new industry, and 'electronic signal' industry, which
will have far greater prospects in the future that the small, bureaucracy
oriented `information industry°. In general, electronic signals will cause
machinery to act, and only rarely will these signals be 'verbalised' and put
into a form which can be outputted on a line printer or processed by a Von
Neumann-type computer program. Our present insistence that signals should all
be of the Von Neumann computer input and computer output form is hampering
our development and turning our industry into a mere adjunct of the
bureaucracy. References. J.K.
Galbraith, The New Industrial State,pub Houghton, Mifflin, Boston, 1967 Peter
Drucker, The Practice of Management, pub. Harper & Row, New York, 1954. I.
Catt, Computer Worship, pub Pitman, London, 1973, p48. I.
Catt, Dinosaur among the data?, New Scientist, 6 March 1969. I.
Catt, Wafer-Scale Integration, Wireless World, July 1981, p57-59. I.
Catt, South Sea Bubble about to burst?, Computer Weekly, London, 3 Nov. 1977. M.J.
Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, Cambridge
University Press, 1981.. ASI
conference, Utrecht. S Y L LAB U S ASI-leergang
"SOFTWARE-CRISIS" 30
september en 1 oktober 1982 [For more details on the conference, go to
bottom.] Jaarbeursgebouw,
Utrecht. Leergang,
georganiseerd door de Afdeling / Sectie Informatietechniek van het Koninklijk
Instituut van Ingenieurs en het Nederlands Genootschap voor Informatica I N H 0
U D S 0 P G A V E .
Voorwoord . Een
gebruiker klaagt aan Drs. C.J. Bakker Centraal Beheer Apeldoorn . De software crisis, ontstaan en hardnekkigheid Prof.Dr.
E.W. Dijkstra Burroughs
Corporation/Technische Hogeschool Eindhoven …. Practical
Application of Software Science Metrics E.B.
Harmse IBM
Nederland Uithoorn The new
bureaucracy I. Catt Watford
College (England) De
software crisis, ontstaan en hardnekkiaheid Officieel
bestaat de software crisis sinds october 1968; teen word zijn bestaan
namelijk openlijk toegegeven op de NATO Conferentie over "Software
Engineering" die to Garmisch-Partenkirchen gehouden ward …. [ |
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