Since the dawn of enterprise digital computing, managers have been looking to computer operators to run data processing jobs on those original workhorses of computation. The goal: to generate reports that the managers would use to make decisions on how to run their companies or government agencies.
Today, those large binders filled with perforated pages striped in glorious green and white may be long gone, but the batch job – paper report – human decision pattern remains engrained on our managerial consciousness, for better or worse.