It is a commonplace observation that organizations, to survive, must adapt to changes in their environment. Those that do not are forced out of business, if they are companies in a competitive market; have their budgets canceled, in the case of government bureaucracies; or are overthrown, in the case of governments themselves.
Just how an organization should be designed to accommodate change is, of course, a much more difficult matter, and has been the subject of many volumes of organizational theory.
What I want to examine here is one aspect of this general problem that seems to have been neglected, namely the effect of information technology on the organization's ability to adapt and change
