The first thing you think of is the control room of the USS Enterprise. The massive visual displays at the front of the room and the banks of computers facing them immediately beam you up to the deck of Star Trek's storied starship.

Then you see the people gathered around the screens at the front of the cavernous room. They're all gazing at the electronic displays, checking row after row of names and numbers -- and then you think that perhaps you're in the operations room of a sports-betting parlor in a Las Vegas casino.

The screens are indeed scoreboards, and the room is in fact a control center -- but it's neither the starship Enterprise nor a casino. Actually, the room is us West's network-reliability operations center, in Littleton, Colorado, and the screens and numbers track the vitality of the phone company's most basic offering: the telephone dial tone. Simply by looking at the names and numbers on the big boards, the 700 us West people who work in this room can instantly see how the company is performing -- where customers in 14 states are having problems with their phones, and how many people are affected by the problems.

The proposition is a simple one: In an information economy, nothing is more essential -- or more valuable -- to a company than real-time information. Yet most companies don't design their workplaces to accommodate the widespread sharing or display of critical information. All too often, for example, office workers have computers on their desks, but the machines aren't configured to permit easy data sharing. Also, regardless of the machinery, the people who sit in front of those machines often hoard the data before them. And most companies never think of erecting a large-scale, public scoreboard that posts company or customer-critical information in a way that not only makes it readily available to all workers but also sends the unmistakable message that sharing information is everyone's job.

There are some notable exceptions to this lack of information sharing: At Chevron, a company with $1.3 billion in net income, employees often meet to share information and to exchange ideas in one of many visualization centers scattered throughout the oil company's San Francisco headquarters. These centers let people gather around enormous screens and project the data and graphics of their choice. For instance, Chevron geologists often use the centers to show locations of current oil fields and to display subsurface seismic surveys that will help them find new reservoirs of oil. In both cases, the aim is to boost the amount of oil the company can extract by using different technologies and drilling techniques. In other companies, scoreboards are designed to generate real-time performance monitoring. At Micron Electronics's factory, in Nampa, Idaho, which manufactures computers for direct sale, a large overhead scoreboard tracks defects, breakdowns along assembly lines, daily and weekly goals, and the company's stock price.

Still, very few companies have attempted to put information at the center of a space as large as the one at us West.