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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 10
Object Description
Title |
Human relations: The key to M.I.S. in the seventies |
Author |
Anonymous |
Subject |
Management information systems Management -- Accounting |
Citation |
H&S Reports, Vol. 10, (1973 summer), p. 10-13 |
Date-Issued | 1973 |
Source | Originally published by: Haskins & Sells |
Rights | Copyright and permission to republish held by: Deloitte |
Type | Text |
Format | PDF page image with corrected OCR scanned at 400 dpi |
Collection | Deloitte Digital Collection |
Digital Publisher | University of Mississippi Library. Accounting Collection |
Date-Digitally Created | 2010 |
Language | eng |
Identifier | HSReports_1973_Summer-p10-13 |