Last week I talked about how the increasing degree of integration in IT wasn't busy destroying innovation, as some other authors have been suggesting. Integration and top-down control are not, however, without their downsides, as this article by former Marine Captain Tyler Boudreau illustrates: an excess of information and a broad capacity for instant communication from top to bottom can lead to confusion, and a quashing of low-level authority and initiative.

The stakes in your business probably aren't as significant as in Captain Boudreau's, but the negative effects of micro-management are every bit as real. Micro-management is nothing new, but with the wealth of information suddenly at every executive's fingertips, and their ability to reach out directly to every employee in their company, it's a much more accessible bad habit than it may have been in the past.

In some respects I expect that corporate executives may be better equipped to handle this temptation than the military officers Boudreau describes; after all, it has taken considerably longer for the battlefield to receive the blessings of information technology than the head office, and even before IT became common in the corporate world, it was always easier for the CEO to walk down the haul and co-opt low-level staff than for the general to scurry through fifty miles of artillery swept battlefield to bend the ear of some corporal.

Still, the combination of automation with information has left some executives with too much time and knowledge and without firm checking somewhere in the corporation they are wont to get their hands dirty in operations without having the feel for things that the nearest responsible employee does. This almost uniformly has negative consequences. So perhaps integration isn't so keen after all. If you're tired of your boss meddling in affairs below his pay grade, consider sabotaging your business intelligence systems and earn yourself some time to work in peace.