Horace Mitchell

A Strategy for Office Automation

What, then, will be the ingredients of a successful management strategy for introducing office automation? Within, naturally, the company’s preferred structure and style of management, we believe a realistic set of requirements can now be seen.

New Technology: Understanding the Impact

We live in a fast-changing world: a world, indeed, in which the pace of change is itself accelerating continuously. The impact of this changing world plays a major part in shaping the tasks and the role of today’s manager. For the manager can no longer simply keep things ticking over smoothly, planning to do much the same — albeit perhaps slightly more, slightly better — as he did last week or last year. He (or she) must be continually alive to the effect which new developments will have upon his company, even upon his own working methods.

The Purpose of Office Systems

There are no simple decisions any more. In this chapter we examine how the changing relationships between the company and its employees, suppliers, customers, government and competitors add complexity to the management task.

Technology in the Office 1: The Mechanisation Phase

The introductory generations of computers — by which, broadly speaking, we mean commercial computers from their introduction in the 1950s to the practical impact of large-scale integration and the minicomputer in the late 1970s — have dominated the development of the postwar office. For more than twenty years, the computer was the centrepiece of the modern, forward-looking concern, the focal point around which plans were made and processes structured. Even companies which came to computing late in this period were infected by the obsession: their long-term plans had been based around the conviction that one day they, too, would have a computer. And that, as far as office automation was concerned, was it: the end of the line.

The Growth and Significance of the Office

The growth of the office over the past hundred years has been so slow and steady that it is easy to overlook the fact that it is, by now, a major factor — perhaps the major factor — in the economic life of the country.

Technology in the Office 2: Frontiers and Barriers

The development of microelectronics and associated new technologies has come so far, so fast, that in a purely technical sense it is now true to say that almost anything is possible. If we can define our requirements precisely (admittedly a major limitation) we can almost certainly design a machine to meet them. Indeed, one of the easiest ways to be proved wrong is to say that ‘such and such a development won’t happen for so and so years’ — some unkind firm will almost certainly announce it within weeks

The Human Factor: A Matter of Choices

Many aspects of new office technology cause apprehension, even fear, among individuals whose work is directly affected by the changes they bring. Concern also exists in society as a whole about the wider impacts of information technology — on employment levels, on the nature of jobs, on the skills and aptitudes new jobs will demand.

The Need for a Management Strategy

Company organisation, structures of command and decisionmaking, and cultural attitudes vary widely from one organisation to another, but the majority have one factor in common: a structure which is poorly adapted to take advantage of today’s technology, let alone the automated office. Until now, office technology has been the concern of the specialist, and very few companies have appreciated, at corporate management level, the full extent to which office automation can affect the overall future success of the enterprise.

Tasks and Techniques: Office Technology as a Tool for Management

A production manager in a major maufacturing plant, the financial manager of an insurance company and the general manager of a chain of grocery stores may appear to have little more in common than that second word in their job title. On a functional level, though, many of the differences dissapear; and the substance , the bare bones of the job which make it a managerial position, come to the fore.

Form and Function: An Approach to the Automated Office

A familiar and useful concept is to think of the work the computer does in terms of an input-processing-output sequence. ‘Input’ refers both to the contents of the work and to the form in which it is entered (punched cards, keyboard entry, stored information on tape, etc.); ‘output’, similarly, means both the information that comes out and its physical form. And the ‘processing’ is what the computer is there for: the essential, if to many mysterious, operation which turns the raw input into the desired finished output.