Human relations: The key to M.I.S. in the seventies;

              Human Relations: The Key
to
.I.S. Management Information Systems
in the
Seventies
The computer offers us the promise of great change in our
world. But there has been a wide gulf between its promise and
its performance in companies that have not thought through the
best ways to use it.
This fact is well known to Haskins & Sells experts in the field of
MAS [Management Advisory Services], who have been warning
for some time of the dangers to businessmen from over-reliance
on the computer without adequately preparing for its effective
use. As management rushed to the computer in the mid-sixties,
our MAS staff found all too often that managers did not realize
that they were faced with a new responsibility. It was to make
sure that the new hardware produced the information they
really needed — not just piles of paper.
That the Haskins & Sells warnings were well founded is borne
out by the record of recent years. Assessing the overall situation
in the Harvard Business Review early last year, Professor John
Dearden of the Harvard Business School had this to say:
'Computers andcomputer-related systems activities have been
growing very rapidly and currently the cost of these activities
has become very significant in many companies. In spite of large
expenditures, however, the quality of the information available
to management appears unimproved. One reason is, of course,
that some computer installations are not run effectively.
Another is that the computer-based information systems have
been oversold; management has been led to expect much more
than it has received. Inotherwords, management's dissatisfaction
with its information occurs, not from any deterioration in its
information systems, but from its inflated expectations."
One of our MAS partners on the Pacific Coast put it bluntly last
year: "All carefully done opinion surveys indicate that well
over 50 per cent of top executives are dissatisfied with data
processing results."
The Root Causes
What were the underlying problems our MAS staff and others
had identified? Why did so much dissatisfaction result?
In essence, the problems did not lie in the area of technical
performance. What the computer could do, if properly used, had
already been clearly shown by the mid-sixties. This accounts
for the race by industrial and other users to equip themselves
with the machines. The problems lay, instead, in the spheres
of psychology and human relations. The perpetual human quest
for panaceas, for example, helps explain why so many managers
wanted to think the machines could solve almost all their
problems for them-almost overnight. Other dominating factors
at work were: problems involved in getting people at all levels
to accept change and to work with it creatively; personal and
group conflicts, jealousies and fears; the reluctance of some
to think constructively together and plan together; and the
perennial problems of establishing a free flow of communications
within any business entity.
Writing in Business Horizons in 1970, G. W. Dickson and John
K. Simmons, faculty members in the University of Minnesota's
School of Business Administration, noted that: "Time and again
it has been said that the 'people problem' is the major difficulty
firms encounter when they attempt to design, develop, and
implement MIS— Management Information Systems..."
Commenting on a study of thirty-six large computer users by
McKinsey & Co., these authors said: "The analysis of the survey
results strongly suggests that computer expenditures are not
being matched by rising economic returns, and that the
underlying reason is essentially behavioral in nature."
Commenting on a similar study, by the University of Minnesota's
Management Information Systems Research Center, they said
it showed that technical problems were "far less crucial than
topics involving people problems in some way."
And last year the Diebold Research Program, in releasing the
results of its study on data base management, said: "Many of the
major technical problems have been resolved in the
establishment of a large data base system. The key issues that
remain are organizational or 'people' problems."
A Refreshing Contrast
With so many problems and so much dissatisfaction, how can
one explain the success the H&S MAS team has had throughout
the country in setting up management information systems
for clients?
One of our top MAS partners explains it simply: "First, we worked
hard to develop a sound concept and approach for developing
an MIS that has proven successful. Secondly, we have been alert
all the way to the human relations problems that could make it
impossible for the approach to work."
He goes on to explain: "This is why the many systems we
developed for major clients in the sixties are alive and well
and functioning beautifully today. The principles were sound
and the overall structures were well built. As clients develop
new or expanding needs, they come back to us for help. The new
pieces we then fashion for them can fit easily into place,
because the overall system provided for them at the outset."
One of our large multi-division clients provides an example
of the kind of step-by-step development within the structure
of a planned information system that has typified the H&S
contribution. One of the MAS partners who was involved in this
work says, "Here was a corporation with half a century of
business history, sixty different divisions, and many different
business lines, operating in many different states. You couldn't
develop its MIS all at one crack, and client management had to
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