Description
Book SynopsisIn addition, this detailed industry case study helps explain information technology's so-called productivity paradox, showing that firms took roughly two decades to achieve the initial computerization and process integration that the industry set as objectives in the 1950s.
Trade ReviewStructuring the Information Age makes educating reading and is an important contribution to our understanding of the connection between past and present in the transformation of socio-economic systems. -- Asaf Darr Administrative Science Quarterly 2006 Brilliant volume... Yate's study of the adaptation of information-processing resources in insurance has greatly widened the horizons of our understanding of the dynamics of technological development in a business setting. Business History Review 2006 Yates has contributed another original study to the history of information technology. -- Kenneth Lipartito Technology and Culture 2006 A welcome addition to a growing body of literature on the history of the use of computers by businesses, and a good model for other scholars to use. -- James W. Cortada American Historical Review 2006 Structuring the Information Age examines the history of information technology in the United States by shifting focus away from the producers of that technology and toward a kind of end user that has heretofore received little attention-large-scale corporations, which easily rank among the leading information-technology (it) consumers. -- Timothy Alborn Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2007 This timely and important work is the first scholarly history devoted to the use of information technology within a single American industry. -- Thomas Haigh EH.Net 2007 This valuable addition to the historiography of the computer looks at new technologies from a user's viewpoint. Here the user is the life insurance business, which is an appropriate choice because it has always been an information-intense business. IEEE History Center Newsletter 2007 Structuring the Information Age will interest two types of readers: those who are concerned with the development, adoption, and impact of technology and those who are concerned with the growth, strategies, and economic influence of business organizations. -- Daphne A. Jameson Journal of Business and Technical Communication 2006
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Life Insurance in the Tabulator Era
1. Insurance at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
2. First Impressions of Tabulating, 1890–1910
3. The Push toward Printing, 1910–1924
4. Insurance Associations and the Flowering of the Tabulator Era
Part II: Life Insurance Enters the Computer Era
5. Early Engagement between Insurance and Computing
6. Insurance Adoption and Use of Early Computers
7. Incremental Migration during the 1960s and 1970s
8. Case Studies in Insurance Computing: New England Mutual Life and Aetna Life
Conclusion
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
