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In a turnaround situation, a new CEO must take actions in the short term to gain control and exercise executive leadership and lay groundwork to formulate a long-term strategy to rebuild a viable business.

Rather than follow the make-and-sell strategies of industrial-age giants, today's successful companies focus on sensing and responding to rapidly changing customer needs. In order to survive in this sense-and-respond world, big companies need to consider a strategy called "managing by wire." In aviation, flying by wire means using computer systems to augment a pilot's ability to assimilate and react to rapidly changing environmental information. In a similar way, managing by wire is the capacity to run a business by managing its informational representation. Coherent corporate behavior needs more than blockbuster applications and network connections; it must be governed by a coherent information model that codifies "how we do things around here," and "how we change how we do things around here." This article describes managing by wire at Mrs. Fields Cookies, Brooklyn Union Gas, and a financial services organization that the authors call Globe Insurance.

Provides a context for the evolution of information technology in business organizations, explains the emergence of information as an important resource to be managed, and provides a framework for assessing the strategic potential of information in the firm.

Policy-making executives can take steps to manage growing data processing resources by analyzing the stages of growth in a company's DP function in terms of six projected stages of growth. In 1977, half of the nation's larger companies were found to be in stage three or four. Levels of achievement can be measured against benchmarks, which, in the first stage of analysis, involve assessment of the data processing expenditure curve. Stage two of this analysis involves defining business functions for the organization unit, determining how data processing supports each function, matching the supports given to the system with the benchmarks of development, and finding mismatches between expenditure and need. After developing an effective strategy, the action of the senior management steering committee determines further managerial development.

An S-curve represents the irregular pattern of an electronic data processing system's development. The curve designates crisis points, which divide four growth stages. Each stage's unique problems demand different managerial approaches to computer applications, computer specialization, and computer personnel.

A unit manager on a field computer installation job is faced with recurring conflict between a programmer and his immediate supervisor.