police officers spend most of their time acqumng, analyzing, and sharing information. Since the acceptance of Frederick Taylor's school of "scientific management" in the 1930s, our society has spread the gospel of process measurement and evaluation leading to rational decision making. We believe that knowledge about production processes will permit increasingly efficient allocation of people and capital resources, thus improving productivity with fewer inputs. Economists measure this secondary information sector by estimating the proportion of work done in each industrial,, sector which is devoted to information handling. By this method, the northwest states devote about one-fourth of their workforce to the secondary information sector, almost the same as the proportion of the California work force engaged in that kind of work. A second way to look at the importance of the ·information handling sector is through the types of jobs held by regional workers. Table 2 shows the percentage of all workers (as of 1983) in each job role, regardless of industry. The secondary information sector in the Northwest is not distinguished, and appears to be neither ahead nor behind national trends. It is worth noting that employment in one of the most information-intensive industries-state and local government-is continuing to decline. Between 1975 and 1985, for instance, the percentage of the Oregon workforce employed by government agencies declined by 5.2%; in the other northwest states government employment declined from 1.9% (Montana) to 3.2% (WashiDgton). In general, our regi0n's development of information activities has come in terms of support services for the management · of traditional industry. There have been few efforts to capitalize Table 1. Selected Statistics on regional strengths in building a strong information economy. Northwest residents have created and implemented some of the most creative strategies for community development and management seen anywhere in the nation, yet few of these have penetrated the secondary information sector. The importance of community involvement and open political processes has not translated into more jobs devoted to communication, public liaison, and involvement processes. The enthusiasm for Pacific Rim markets and relationships has not produced significant programs in Asian languages and cultures, neither in the classroom nor corporate office. Our struggle to manage enormous geographical spaces has produced little marketable expertise in communications networks and distributed management techniques. We will need to develop a vocabulary and self-consciousness about these regional specialities if we are to capitalize on our strengths and take on a role of national leadership. In Megatrends, John Naisbitt introduced many readers to the reality of the contemporary "information age," and stressed that his method and his vision had less to do with what was to come than with simply describing what was already true in 1983. As early as 1973, Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell outlined The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, stimulating a decade of serious scholarly literature on the economic shifts facing the world. Updating his analysis in 1979, Bell wrote that: "The crucial point about a post-industrial society is that knowledge and information become the strategic and transforming resources of the society, just as capital and labor have been the strategic COMPUTER SOFTWARE DAILY TOTAL NEWSPAPERS Alaska Idaho Montana Oregon Washington POPULATION 406,000 943,000 787,000 2,632,000 4,130,000 MFG.FIRMS 0 8 3 26 39 FIRMS 43 74 67 328 590 NEWSPAPERS 7 11 10 20 25 26 61 61 109 143 Sources:The 1985 IMS/AYER Directory of Publications. IMS Press: Fort Washington, PA, 1985, and Electronic Yellow Pages Manufacturer's Directory and Services Directory. Produced by Market Data Retrieval, Inc. Available through Dialog Information Services files 509, 510. Fall/Winter 1986 RAIN Page 5
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