ABSTRACT
Technology and technologists are very good data providers. Organisations, processes and decision making commonly adhere to norms developed when instant messaging meant sending a telegram and the telephone was a rare and exotic instrument. The whole notion of the paperless office seems ridiculous, emerging generations of technology continue to exacerbate the problem. The information challenge is to escape the thrall of technology and to design whole organisations as adaptive systems embedding distributed control through information. The information system is not simply an attribute of the organisation, it is the organisation. The Intelligent Organisation recognises that information is the binding, synthesising feature that integrates fulfilment of purpose through value-generating and value-enabling activity. The contemporary convention in commissioning an information system or technology project is to identify a problem to be solved, measure the cost of solving it, and capitalise it all.
