Thomas Allen obituary: World-renowned expert in organisational management

Thomas Allen
Born: August 20th, 1931
Died: November 13th, 2020

Thomas Allen, who died in November aged 89, was a fourth-generation Irish-American from Newark, New Jersey, who became a world-renowned expert in organisational management. Through his work with various government agencies here from the late 1960s onwards, he had a significant influence on a generation of Irish technologists, government researchers and business management experts. From 1993, he taught at University College, Dublin, as a distinguished visiting professor and, from 1997 until 2004, as the first director of the National Institute of Technology Management at the university.

Earlier, from 1969, he had been an adviser to An Foras Taluntais (now part of Teagasc), his first work in Ireland. The institute’s range of research centres across the State “was an ideal working laboratory for his work”, according to Dermot O’Doherty, who worked with Allen in government-sponsored research organisations from the 1970s.

Allen was renowned for his development of the theory known as the Allen Curve. His work in this area had a global impact

Allen looked at its information dissemination and knowledge diffusion activities across its specialised centres, in particular at how researchers learned from each other but also how that knowledge was passed on to the “users” – farmers, advisers and food technologists.

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The impact of Allen’s work and the significance of “knowledge transfer” can be seen in the modern Teagasc, including how farmers can and should learn from each other, says O’Doherty.

Allen developed strong links with Irish science, technology and innovation policy agencies such as the National Science Council and the National Board for Science and Technology, as well as later with Enterprise Ireland, and had a significant influence on the evolution of areas such as the transfer of research results from academia to industry.

Proud heritage

Allen kept a home in Blackrock, Co Dublin, and his remains are now interred at Springfield Cemetery, Bray, Co Wicklow. He was proud of the heritage of his parents’ families – that of his father, Thomas Allen snr, in Rathconrath, Co Westmeath, and of his mother, Margaret Conley, in Ferbane, Co Offaly.

Allen had, in reality, several careers. Unusually, he was a double honours graduate in both the sciences and the humanities, in physics and history, from Upsala College, New Jersey, from which he graduated in 1954. After his studies he served with the US marines in Korea and Japan.

He worked with Boeing from 1959 and, during his time there in 1963, he took a Master’s degree in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was then he switched his attention to the problems of how to manage technology in large firms and workplaces of all kinds. He took a PhD at MIT in organisational management in 1966 and was immediately appointed to the MIT staff, something very unusual at that time.

Allen was renowned for his development of the theory known as the Allen Curve, a formula for linking the effectiveness of communication among “technological gatekeepers” in large corporations; in essence, people who receive and communicate to others new developments in technology happening within their own organisations but which, because of the physical separation from each other in such organisations, either go unnoticed or are inefficiently disseminated.

His work in this area had a global impact and Allen was awarded honorary doctorates from universities in Sweden, Belgium and Spain. Speaking to The Irish Times this week, his long-time colleague Prof Gunter Henn, formerly a professor of architecture at the Technological University of Dresden in Germany and who worked closely with Allen on the design of the BMW Research Centre in Munich and the Volkswagen Design and Development Centre in Dresden, described the significance of Allen’s work as being about “the importance of community; every organisation is a community, be it a university, a company [like BMW or Volkswagen] or a [non-governmental] organisation, it is always a community.” Dr Henn stressed that this process is always dynamic, never static: “Society and companies only exist by communication and communication is an emerging system, and the Allen Curve supports this.”

For example, the design for the BMW and Volkswagen structures, while providing for separate buildings for the various elements involved, also include as a central aspect an informal building space where scientists and designers meet to exchange ideas, a process which, Dr Henn stresses, leads to and aids innovation.

Pioneering works

Allen was the author and co-author of two pioneering works: Managing the Flow of Technology (MIT Press, 1984) and (with Henn) The Organisation and Architecture of Innovation (Routledge, 2006).

Another former colleague at MIT, where Allen taught from 1966 at the Sloan School of Management and where he was a professor of management from 1985 until 2013, Dr Edward Roberts, describes Allen’s modus operandi at MIT:

“Tom observed that Nasa, our first primary research supporter, was awarding multiple contracts in parallel to several companies at once, to get all of them working on attempts to solve major obstacles to the space programme. Tom . . . [went] to these companies and studied the different teams and processes in parallel firms. Thus he could examine in depth all of the detailed aspects of different organisations at work independently on the same exact problems. From those studies he discovered much about technical problem-solving and, especially, identified the role of technical communications in those problem-solving efforts. He demonstrated how social ties affected technical communications between engineers.

“He then began to realise that the organisational structures they were part of had important influence. And finally he realised that the physical space the teams worked in strongly affected their communications and hence their effectiveness in solving technical problems.”

Outside of his professional life, Allen was also a man of pronounced commitments. An intervarsity wrestler at Upsala, he strongly supported the notion that, for students, study and sport very much went together. For 25 years he was chairman of the MIT athletic board. He was also a devout Catholic all his life and an enthusiastic ecumenist, participating in particular on an ecumenical Catholic-Jewish committee in the greater Boston area.

Allen was notably popular with colleagues. His successor at the National Institute of Technology Management, Breffni Tomlin, says, “Everyone who know Tom used the word ‘integrity’ to describe him. He was a totally reliable human being.”

Thomas Allen is survived by his wife Joan (née Gilmartin), formerly a secretary, their children Thomas jnr, Susan and Mairin, and his brother John.