Plant Management, the Locus of Decision Making, and the Information Services Department.

A theory of intraorganizational power is discussed and applied to the information services department. This study involved the collection of data from 37 plant managers on their perceptions of the power of information services. The results indicate that plant managers, like their department manager counterparts in an earlier study, considered the information services department to be the least critical for success of five departments. Centralization of decision making was found to be positively related to information services department power. The implications of the study for distributed versus centralized information processing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]