CBI associate director Jeffrey Yost attended and presented a paper at the Center for Business History, Copenhagen Business School’s (CBS) “IT in Shaping Organizations” workshop. The event, held on June 8-9, 2009, was organized by Professor Lars Heide (CBS) and brought together historians and management scholars from around the world.
Papers at the workshop looked at numerous topics exploring the role of computing within companies, government, and other organizations. Roughly half of the dozen papers addressed computing in banking—examining developments in Great Britain, Sweden, and the US. Computing in the UK steel industry was addressed in an engaging paper by Jonathan Aylen, which detailed developments at the Llanwern steelworks in South Wales. Other papers compared multiple industries or examined broad themes, such as Robert Austin’s study of the benefits and costs of “flexibility” in producing software; Timo Leimbach’s examination of materials and information flows from MRP to ERP between 1960 and 1990; and Yost’s study of organizational boundaries of IT operations.
Yost also attended the Business History Conference in Milan—which immediately followed the Copenhagen workshop on June 11-14. The theme of conference was “Fashions,” broadly defined. There were a substantial number of papers on the fashion industry, others on “fashions” or trends in business, as well as a substantial number on unrelated themes (submissions on any theme in business history are always welcome at BHC). This latter category included a handful of papers on computer history.
Of particular note was a paper delivered by David Kirsch (University of Maryland) that he co-wrote with Gina Neff (University of Washington) on the “Materiality of Failure.” Drawing on the concept of industrial archeology, they explored the different stages of business failure (and associated materiality—artifacts, documents, etc.) analyzing the national law firm Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison’s failure and aftermath as an empirical case.
For the better part of a decade, David Kirsch has led a “Business Plan Archive” project to document the so-called “dot-com collapse.” As part of this project Kirsch and Neff had the opportunity to collect documentation from Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison. This law firm, founded in 1926, opened the first satellite office in Palo Alto in 1980. It became the second largest law firm representing technology ventures—and as such, had very extensive documentation on many aspects of IT firms. In February 2003, in the aftermath of challenges from the dot.com collapse, Brobeck, Pleger & Harrison announced its intention to liquidate. That summer Kirsch and Neff visited the San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and San Diego offices of the firm in an effort to collect materials for their archive. In September 2003 the firm’s liquidation committee was ousted by creditors, who forced the company into bankruptcy. In 2006 the court authorized the existence of a “closed archive”—allowing Kirsch and Neff to proceed with their plans. In outlining the case of Brobeck, Phleger, and Harrison’s failure, Kirsch detailed the complexity and uncertainty of this process, the different expectations of various actors (researchers, the firm’s executives, creditors, landlords of facilities, etc.) and material consequences (in terms of artifacts and documentation). Fortunately, Kirsch and Neff were able to save a substantial portion of this extremely rich source of IT history. While it remains a closed archive at this time, there is a possibility that it might one day be open—and even before this, it might be possible for researchers to gain access to particular materials within the collection. This is also true with the Business Plan Archive, of which the Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison records are a constituent part. Researchers are encouraged to visit the Business Plan Archive Web site <www.businessplanarchive.org> and/or contact David Kirsch <dkirsch@rhsmith.umd.edu> regarding this material.
Other papers on or related to computer history at the 2009 Business History Conference included:
Paul Thomes, “Push and Pull: IT, Cashless Wage Payments, and Business Practices: The Case of the German Savings Bank and Mutual Banks in the 1950s and 1960s.” Gustav Sjoblom, “Computers in Business: The Swedish Way?” Bernardo Batiz-Lazo, “Self-Service in the Digital Age: Convergence of Technology and Business Models in Retail Markets.” Andrew Russell, “ ‘Industrial Legislatures’: Consensus Standardization in the Second and Third Industrial Revolutions.” Jesus M. Valdaliso et al., “Social Capital, Competitiveness, and Internationalization: The Electronics and ICT Cluster of the Basque Country.” Pierre Mounier-Kuhn, “Service Bureau: From ‘Local Processing’ to Outsourcing, 1930s-1970s.”
Jeffrey Yost