by Barbara Honegger Senior Military Affairs Journalist
A professor with the Naval Postgraduate School’s Graduate School of Business and Public Policy has co-edited the first book on managing the information economy written for the business research community.
Prof. Uday Apte, a specialist in service-sector operations management, is also author of three research papers in the new anthology, Managing in the Information Economy: Current Research Issues, published by Springer Publication in June.
The volume introduces readers to current research in managing the information economy and highlights important future areas for study. It opens with a discussion on the information economy as a whole, followed by sections as on structure and organization, marketing and e-commerce; emerging strategy and ethics issues, operations, and empirical studies of business practices.
“The research papers and articles in this book represent the state of the art in the emerging area of managing in the information- and knowledge-based economy,” Uday said. “This is important because the information economy now comprises over 60 percent of the U.S. economy in terms of value added to the GNP [Gross National Product].”
Following early researcher in the field Michael Porat, Uday defines the information economy as that involved in transforming information from one pattern to another, as compared to the traditional sector which is focused on transforming matter and energy from one form into another.
“There are two major trends in post-industrial economies,” Uday explained. “The first is a shift to a service economy and the second a shift to an information economy, which have been compared to the Industrial Revolution. Not surprisingly given these trends, the largest part of the information economy is the information services sector.”
One of the surprises in the book is that the U.S. economy is estimated to be in only the middle of the shift to a fully mature information economy. In 1967, the information economy in the U.S. comprised 46 percent of the total. Forty years later it has now risen to over 63 percent in response to the surge in investment in information technologies and training.
“It’s important to note that the shift to an information -- and particularly an information services-based -- economy is an ongoing process with different countries at different stages,” Uday stressed. “Across all the G7 countries, which includes the U.S., our management principles and models were mainly developed for the industrial age, so using them when traditional physical goods manufacturing represents only a small part of the economy is like fighting the last war. Business managers need to know how adapt to the changed environment, and this book addresses that need.”
One of Uday’s findings, in a study commissioned by the World Bank in 1995, is that an estimated 10.5 million service jobs in the U.S. are potential candidates for outsourcing to other countries.
“As the European empires expanded and then receded, they left their languages behind, impacting especially the educated segments of colonized populations,” Uday said. “We’re now in the next phase, where mostly English and Spanish speakers in these former colonies can participate in the move towards the outsourcing of information service jobs from the developed economies. India is the prime example, where up to 30 million English speakers are able to perform this work. Because there are lots of rich and poor English speakers in the world but few in the middle, outsourcing will increase the middle class worldwide. Increased trading in information-intensive services will ultimately make the world more flat, and more fair.”
“The strategic management of information is a critical success factor for business worldwide,” said GSBPP Dean Robert Beck, “so I am pleased to see one of our NPS faculty is leading its development.”
Apte’s co-editor for the anthology is Prof. Uday Karmarkar of the University of California at Los Angeles. Other contributors are faculty members and leading researchers in the field from Harvard, Stanford, Wharton, Northwestern and the University of California at Berkeley, among others.
