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THE PRESENT ERA: MANAGING CHANGE IN THE INFORMATION AGE 38 tion and growth of important commercial markets (commercial aviation and computers for business and personal use are just two examples). However, these expenditures have also led indirectly to the decline of interest in fields that later proved important. For example, the near-demise of the traditional electrical power option in engineering curricula had major repercussions when the energy crisis arrived in 1973; and the decline of interest in manufacturing engineering has no doubt figured in the gradual loss of goods production to factories abroad in recent years. The panel believes that there is a strong imbalance in the overall impact that government spending has on the commercial sector and on defense. Policymakers should recognize that, ultimately, the private/commercial sector and the public/defense sector of the economy are interrelated. To a large extent the nation's economic health, its innovative capacity, and its productivity depend on the strength of private business and industry. In that sense, the strength of the commercial infrastructure is a basic element of national security; its maintenance and support should be matters of concern to the federal government. The Information Explosion A second major change in the postwar period has been the emergence of information as a new type of commodity. The technological society produces and uses data at an increasingly rapid rate. The proliferation of technological goods and services combines with the information needs of a growing, increasingly sophisticated population to create a strong demand for improved means of generating, storing, manipulating, and communicating information. Especially in industry and government, problems of information resource managementâthat is, how to handle and distribute massive amounts of information efficiently within an organizationâhave gained prominence over the past two decades. The major new development affecting engineering with regard to this phenomenon has been the advent of the computer. As a new technology the computer may surpass the steam engine in its impact on the way business is done, and indeed on the very nature of business. It is a major factor in the shift toward a service-based economy in the United States, in which the production and management of information predominates over hard goods. Because computer systems, which were devised to handle large quantities of data, also produce it in large quantities, they are both a cause and an effect of the "information explosion" of the past 20 years. Furthermore, advances in computer technology are generalizable to a great many applications, not all of
