Information Revolution A Misnomer, Says MIT Researcher

This is not the information age, according to an essay just published by Michael Schrage, a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The revolution that is going on is about relationships, not information. His essay, "The Relationship Revolution," has just been published by The Merrill Lynch Forum as the first in an occasional series of white papers on technological change.

Schrage is a columnist for Computerworld, a contributing editor to Wired magazine and the author of "No More Teams! Mastering the Dynamics of Creative Collaboration." He is a former visiting scholar at MIT’s famous Media Lab.

Schrage argues that viewing new technologies such as computers and the Internet "through the lens of information’ is dangerously myopic." Any new technology is important not for the information it carries but for the relationships it creates or changes, he says. "To say that the Internet is about information is a bit like saying that cooking is about oven temperatures: it’s technically accurate but fundamentally untrue."

In fact, Schrage suggests, information may be losing rather than gaining value simply because there is so much of it. "The value challenge shifts from gathering and disseminating information to packaging and bundling it in unexpected ways. Here may lie the irony of our so-called Information Age: information itself offers value only when presented in the context of particular relationships."

What do Schrage’s theories mean in the practical world? For one thing, he writes, they mean that businesses and other organizations should not think so much about the information they want their networks to carry as about the relationships they want to create — with suppliers, with customers, and among the people within the organization.

He suggests that managers in Fortune 1000 companies, if presented with a choice between a technology that doubled their ability to manage information and one that offered a 20 percent improvement in their working relationships with bosses, subordinates, colleagues, and clients, would clearly choose the latter.

Too much focus on managing information might be the reason so-called "information technology" seems not to have brought the hoped-for improvement in office productivity, he adds. "The bottlenecks in many global organizations today are more a function of troubled and dysfunctional management relationships than information deprivation."

Schrage also writes that success in new media such as the Internet depends on the relationships you help people create. "Every organization that has enjoyed success on the World Wide Web describes the need to create contexts of community for its participants. They recognize that the quality and quantity of interaction matters every bit as much as the quality and quantity of information."

Copies of "The Relationship Revolution" are available from The Merrill Lynch Forum by calling 888-33FORUM or sending e-mail to mlforum@banmail.ml.com.

(Contact: Andrew Sieg, The Merrill Lynch Forum, 212-449-7545)