▪ Sumner, J. (2015), See also in extract from the paper in Articles
section
History and Technology, an International Open Access Journal,
Volume 30, 2014, Issue 4, pages 309-333 | Published online: 24
Feb 2015.
https://www.escholar.manchester.ac.uk/api/datastream?publicationPid=uk-ac-man-scw:261886&datastreamId=POST-PEER-REVIEW-PUBLISHERS.PDF
In 1947, J. Lyons and Company, Britain’s leading catering firm, sent two
senior managers to the USA to investigate American systems of office
management. Their bald conclusion was that established practice could
teach them nothing: ‘We did not find any firm which has developed on
so broad a front as Lyons, most offices only having tackled a limited
number of office problems without having surveyed the whole field’.
Physical layouts – notably including that of the Pentagon – were poor,
and development plans conservative, tending blindly to ignore the
potential of rapid electronic processing. Far more exciting was the
extensive American work on digital computing, but this was still largely
uncommercialised.11 Learning that there were British efforts in the
same direction, the Lyons managers fostered a partnership with
researchers at the University of Cambridge to develop the Lyons
Electronic Office (LEO), which automated the bulk of the firm’s payroll,
stock control and valuation tasks across 1951–54, placing it at the
forefront of international developments in this field. Lyons then formed
a subsidiary to market LEO equipment to other businesses, stressing its
business context as a unique guarantee of user-focused design.
Ref
A similar story played out in parallel at Ferranti, the commercial
electrical and defence contracting group, which in 1948 sent a
representative, Dietrich Prinz, to the USA to assess the state of the art in
digital computing. Prinz’s American hosts, according to company legend,
wondered ‘why he had come there, since the most advanced work was
being done on Ferranti’s doorstep at Manchester University’, where the
cathode ray tube storage system had become the basis for a prototype
computer.