While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple andGoogle’s ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamentaltransformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processingmachines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and analyze information(often in digital form) to do their jobs. This book offers a guide to the role ofinformation in modern business, mapping the use of information within workprocesses, tracing flows of information across supply-chain management, productdevelopment, customer relations, and sales. The emphasis is on information itself, not information technology. Information, overshadowed for a while by the glamour andnovelty of IT, is the fundamental component of the modern corporation. InInformation and the Modern Corporation, longtime IBM manager and consultant JamesCortada clarifies the differences among data, facts, information, and knowledge anddescribes how the art of analytics has all but eliminated decision making based ongut feeling, replacing it with fact-based decisions. He describes the working styleof road warriors, whose offices are anywhere their laptops and cellphones are and whose deep knowledge of a given topic becomes their medium ofexchange. Information is the core of the modern enterprise, and the use ofinformation defines the activities of a firm. Cortada’s essential guide showsmanagers and employees better ways to leverage information–by design and not byaccident.