ICON: A Case Study in Office Automation and Microcomputing

The following is a story about a small company in Philadelphia called Information Concepts, Inc., or, more colloquially, ICON. ICON's business is doing technical writing on a consulting basis for various firms in the production instrumentation and computer industries, ICON also serves as editor for several trade magazines and newsletters relating to instrumentation and process control, as well as providing market research studies for this industry. The basic product of ICON is therefore information in the form of text . The focus of this study is on the technologies ICON uses to produce this text. Over the past four years, ICON's operations have shifted from being basically typewriter-based to one that now uses among the most sophisticated of word processing and office automation technology. The purpose of this study is to examine the factors which enabled and encouraged this evolution. Of particular interest is the fact that ICON is an extremely small company, ranging variously from five to ten people, and so had very little capital to spare. Thus this remarkably rapid development took place under severe budget constraints, with payback periods ranging from six to 18 months