Walter Shewhart's work was based on the ability to define and manage a process, some logic series of activities, and measure outcomes. It didn't matter what it was. An interesting book has been published outlining the use of SPC in a Geisha house. In the days of Deming, from the 1950s to the late 1980s, there was little use of computers in support of this. Deming famously stated that production managers should ignore computers. They are a waste of time, he said.

Surely the statement was fueled by the matters of creativity and control. If you can't manage the details of computerized processes and your job is to tweak process elements based on ongoing interpretation of data, computerization would mess with your success. The point is that just as the power of the process was made clear, computerization was presented en mass in the form of hugely complex systems based on breathtakingly difficult and complicated languages and models. People struggling to master knowledge of important subjects, the ones capable of carrying out Shewhart's methods, would have little time or energy to master such process design tools, regardless of their capacity to do so.

The result has been a world not unlike that of the world before the printing press became common, before the Gutenberg press in particular. Knowledge is bound up. Much of it is simply not used, certainly not in the particular contexts in which it is needed.

It's not that there isn't content on the Internet. Duh! But it is not the type of content that encourages the detailed application of science. We have many documents, but what we don't have is detailed acting out of the minute logical steps that must be followed, based on changing inputs, directly tied to the detailed knowledge of the experts in the field. In our day of mass computerization and ever-present networking, it would be more than nice to bring Shewhart's scientific method in sync with the devices everybody is carrying around.