Portland International Engineering and Technology Management Center

Over the past 40 years, humankind’s capacity to store, process and manage information has increased at a staggering, yet relatively predictable pace. In one way or another, progress in the information age has been tied to “Moore’s Law”, which states that the number of devices on integrated circuits (or silicon chips) tends to quadruple about every three years.[1] The cost of storing, processing and managing information has dropped accordingly. A personal computer costing less than $1000 at a retail outlet today has more capabilities than a mainframe computer of the 1960s, which may have cost more than $1 million to build.

The low cost and widespread availability of information technology has enabled manufacturers’ move from mass production techniques to mass customization.[2] Manufacturers are now able to control their processes and manage their supply chains to the point where they can let customers design products to meet individual need. The manufacturer builds these designs to order, just in time. This capability is perhaps best illustrated by the way Dell allows its customers to generate the design specification of a computer that Dell subsequently builds and delivers to the customer within a few days. The customer does not need to understand how Dell achieves this feat; Dell is effectively acting as a black box.

Another fortuitous consequence of continuous improvement in information technology is increased knowledge diversity. We are not only able to accumulate an ever-greater stock of knowledge; we are also increasingly able to understand more about less. Knowledge is becoming ever more specialized.

Knowledge diversity is derived from communities of scholars and practitioners pursuing very specific subjects. Magazines, journals and, more recently, web sites act as media through which these communities interact, communicate and create new knowledge. They become knowledge artifacts that community members treasure, but outsiders basically ignore.

The cost of the knowledge artifact is inversely proportional to the size of the interested community. Bestsellers that are read by essentially everyone contain “common knowledge”; they can be purchased in paperback over the Internet from one or more of the leading publishing houses for less than $20. By contrast, relatively arcane scientific periodicals may contain knowledge that is understood and appreciated by a very small community. The cost of these periodicals may be so high that individuals cannot afford to own them. They are typically purchased by and stored in libraries, where – in principle – they are accessible to everyone. However, in practice very few people care about the existence of these periodicals, so the cost of owning them may even exceed the budget of a public library.

Should the library choose not to subscribe to an extremely expensive periodical, the knowledge contained therein would be kept from the few users of the library who need this knowledge to interact meaningfully with the knowledge-creating community that relies on said periodical as a knowledge artifact. Budgetary constraints in multiple libraries may even render the whole knowledge-creating community dysfunctional by depriving the community of its core knowledge artifact. If too few community members have access to the periodical that sustains the community, then the community ceases to operate effectively. Continue

[1] For a discussion of Moore’s law, please see, for example, Gordon Moore, “Progress in digital integrated circuits,” IEDM Tech. Dig., 1975, p. 11.

[2] For an in depth look into mass customization, please see Joe Pine, Mass Customization: The Next Frontier of Business Competition, Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993.