From the Archives...

The Management Center as Information Factory

[Matt Taylor Journal page 642, June 30, 1984, 7:32PM]
Capitol Hill, Washington, D.C.

In introducing the Center to clients during DesignShop® events, I often refer to Management Centers as "Information Factories." This is not intended to be taken metaphorically; I mean to be understood literally. And following the principles of the 7th Domain: Venture Management, every scrap of information is to be used and reused--combined, added to--stored, retrieved, analyzed, synthesized, AND made available to each user "at the right time and place, in the right amount of detail." The use of the information becomes itself an item of information. The information connected with human action becomes knowledge; the sum becomes a Knowledge industry, (i.e., the industry of knowledge).

The procedures and facilitation methods utilized in Management Centers are the factory's process engineering (using this term as it is meant in industrial engineering). Throughout this factory process ideas and data are refined until a product is developed. This is not a dry mechanical process as the factory "image" usually conjures up; that image and reality of the factory is ready for the scrap heap of history. To understand the idea of Management Centers as information factories, is also to build in one's mind a new image of the industrial factory and that 19th century factory now called the office. These old ideas must be recreated, generalized (seeing present practices as special cases) and placed into a new humanistic context. A new Art and Science is being developed: that of information processing. At the core of this is a unique concept of information management and of the human creative process. At the center of this is a unique organization presently called the "Knowledge Center" (Domain #1). The Knowledge Center had its first expression in the Renascence Library (Kansas City, 1974-1980); and was further developed in my concept of Earth Library (Boulder, 1979-81). The Earth Library concept deals with issues related to a network of Knowledge Centers located in Management Centers throughout the globe and the use of CyberConn™ system to link, synthesize, communicate a new cultural paradigm. Central to all this work over the last decade is the idea of a new level of human tooling to meet transformational demands.

copyright © 1984, MG Taylor Corporation. All rights reserved
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