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28 The EO Computer Services Department: Maintaining Our Leadership Position Many people hate it; most people don't understand it. But the fact remains that there probably is no one alive in the United States today, and few enough in the world, whose life has not been touched by the computer. In a philosophical sense, the computer may well represent man's most successful attempt to date to extend his ego, to increase his powers of memory and computation, even his ability to explore the universe around him, to a degree undreamed of only a few decades ago. Whatever the philosophical implications, no one can deny that this is the Age of the Computer. Industrialized nations have become as dependent on computers as agricultural economies are dependent on climatic conditions. If the fifteenth-century Venetian Luca Paciolo, author of the first printed treatise on bookkeeping, might be thought of as the patron saint of accounting, Janus, the double-faced Roman god, may well be the deity of electronic data processing, which has created almost as many problems for the accounting profession as it has helped solve. "EDP has given many of our clients the ability to store vast amounts of financial, inventory and other information so that it is readily accessible, information that previously had been handled manually and therefore was not usable in making day-to-day decisions," observed Joseph D. Wessel-kamper, partner in charge of the Executive Office Computer Services Department. "As these clients became more sophisticated in their use of computers, the public accounting profession found it imperative to devise its own techniques for obtaining ready access to the information we need to perform our services." "You've got three basic factors to take into consideration," partner Richard A. Snyder added. "The first is the constant improvements in hardware technology, increasing the flexibility and capability of EDP systems. Second, the user is growing more expert in employing the computer in his own business. And third, the accounting profession has not only to stay abreast of these developments, but actually to keep ahead of them so that we can perform audit and other services from computerized records as accurately as we did in the past from those produced manually." Dick has responsibility for the Professional Systems group of the department. Under the Firm's organizational structure, the Computer Services Department reports to J. William Stewart, Jr., EO partner in charge of client services coordination. Broad policy decisions and overall