Maintaining our leadership position;

              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