Introduction to Operations Research. Flood, R. Rethinking the Fifth Discipline : Learning within the Unknowable. London, UK: Routledge. Jackson, M. Initial results from a research program. Flood, M. Jackson and P. Keys eds. Lewin, K. Group Decision and Social Change. Magee, C. Miller, J. Senge, P. Wiener, N. Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine. Chang, C. Systems Thinking, Systems Practice.
Blanchard, B. Systems Engineering and Analysis, 4th ed. Bowler, D. Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Elsevier. Boulding, K. The World as a Total System. Hitchins, D. Laszlo, E. The Relevance of General Systems Theory.
Skyttner, L. General Systems Theory - An Introduction. Basingstoke, UK: Macmillan Press. Warfield, J. An Introduction to Systems Science. Singapore: World Scientific Publishing Co.
Pte Ltd. Lusch, R. Vargo Eds. Maglio P. Srinivasan, J. Kreulen, and J. Popper, K. Objective Knowledge , 2nd edition. Salvendy, G. But Prince was convinced that times were changing and that systems analysis was going to be a vital field in the future. He recognized computers were now sophisticated enough to do routine tasks. This better allowed systems analysts to evaluate systems and run simulations to compare alternative systems. A systems analysis student in working on the state-of-the-art IBM It was clear that companies needed better methods to create diverse, productive, and efficient systems.
As the market was becoming more and more competitive, companies had to step up their production and bring costs down. This is where computers and the systems analysts came in.
In many ways, the systems analysis curriculum of is similar to the computer science curriculum of This was adopted by Thomas Watson, Sr. Also, Burroughs was a major player in the early adding machine industry. The first typewriters were also introduced in the late 's which had a tremendous effect on correspondence and order processing. This was led primarily by Remington Arms later to become Remington Rand. In the early 's, tabulating equipment was introduced to support such things as census counting.
This was then widely adopted by corporate America. Occasionally you will run into old-timers who can describe how they could program such machines using plug boards. Punch card sorters were added as an adjunct to tabulating equipment. However, he had a falling out with Patterson who fired him. As a small bit of trivia, after Watson died, he was buried in Dayton on a hilltop overlooking NCR headquarters, the company he couldn't conquer.
We did it so well that many people, including the Japanese, contend it gave the Allies a competitive edge during the war. The lesson here, therefore, is that manually implemented systems have been with us long before the computer and are still with us today. To give you a sense of history in this regard, consider one of our more popular Bryce's Laws:. One major development in this area was the work of Leslie "Les" Matthies, the legendary Dean of Systems.
Les graduated from the University of California at Berkeley during the Depression with a degree in Journalism. Being a writer, he tried his hand at writing Broadway plays. But work was hard to come by during this period and when World War II broke out, Les was recruited by an aircraft manufacturer in the midwest to systematize the production of aircraft.
Relying on his experience as a writer, he devised the "Playscript" technique for writing procedures. He even went so far as to devise rules for writing "If" statements. It is still an excellent way to write procedures today. Ironically, Les did not know what a profound effect his technique would have later on in the development of computer programs. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly.
Bureau of the Census. Corporate America took notice of the computer and companies such as DuPont in Wilmington, Delaware began to lineup to experiment with it for commercial purposes. This caused IBM to invent the and its series.
Other manufacturers quickly joined the fray and computing began to proliferate. Programming the early machines was difficult as it was performed in a seemingly cryptic Machine Language the first generation language. This eventually gave way to the Assembly Language the second generation language which was easier to read and understand.
Regardless, many of the utilities we take for granted today e. In other words, programming was a laborious task during this period. Recognizing both the limitations and potential of the computer, the 's represented the age of experimentation for corporate America. Here, the emphasis was not on implementing major systems through the computer, but rather to develop an assortment of programs to test the machine as a viable product.
As such, programmers were considered odd characters who maintained "the black box," and were not yet considered a part of the mainstream of systems development. The "Systems and Procedures Departments" still represented the lion's share of systems work in corporate America, with an occasional foray to investigate the use of the computer.
The computer people were segregated into "computer departments" later to be known as "EDP" or "Data Processing" departments. Competition between computer manufacturers heated up during this decade, resulting in improvements in speed, capacity, and capabilities. Of importance here was the introduction of the much touted IBM the number was selected to denote it was a comprehensive solution - degrees.
Other computer vendors offered products with comparable performance, if not more so, but the IBM was widely adopted by corporate America. The programming of computers was still a difficult task and, consequentially, Procedural Languages were introduced the third generation languages.
Interestingly, these languages were patterned after Les Matthies' "Playscript" technique which made active use of verbs, nouns, and "if" statements. The intent of the Procedural Languages was twofold: to simplify programming by using more English-like languages, and; to create universal languages that would cross hardware boundaries.
The first goal was achieved, the second was not. If the languages were truly universal, it would mean that software would be portable across all hardware configurations.
Manufacturers saw this as a threat; making software truly portable made the selection of hardware irrelevant and, conceivably, customers could migrate away from computer vendors. In order to avoid this, small nuances were introduced to the compilers for the Procedural Languages thereby negating the concept of portability.
This issue would be ignored for many years until the advent of the Java programming language. The "DBMS" designation actually came afterwards. Early pioneers in this area included Charlie Bachman of G. IMS, on the other hand, was a hierarchical model involving tree-processing. Realizing that programming and data access was becoming easier and computer performance being enhanced, companies now wanted to capitalize on this technology.
As a result, corporate America embarked on the era of "Management Information Systems" MIS which were large systems aimed at automating business processes across the enterprise. These were major system development efforts that challenged both management and technical expertise. This was a major milestone in the history of systems. The systems people had to learn about computer technology and the programmers had to learn about business systems.
Recognizing that common data elements were used to produce the various reports produced from an MIS, it started to become obvious that data should be shared and reused in order to eliminate redundancy, and to promote system integration and consistent data results.
The original DM organizations were patterned after Inventory Control Departments where the various components were uniquely identified, shared and cross-referenced.
To assist in this regard, such organizations made use of the emerging DBMS technology. Unfortunately, many DM organizations lost sight of their original charter and, instead, became obsessed with the DBMS. Data as used and maintained outside of the computer was erroneously considered irrelevant.
Even worse, the DBMS was used as nothing more than an elegant access method by programmers. Consequently, data redundancy plagued systems almost immediately and the opportunity to share and reuse data was lost.
This is a serious problem that persists in companies to this day. Although the MIS movement was noble and ambitious in intent, it floundered due to the size and complexity of the task at hand.
Many MIS projects suffered from false starts and botched implementations. This resulted in a period where a series of new methods, tools and techniques were introduced to reign in these huge development efforts. The first was the introduction of the "methodology" which provided a road map or handbook on how to successfully implement systems development projects.
Although the forte of "PRIDE" was how to build systems, it was initially used for nothing more than documentation and as a means to manage projects. Several CPA based methodologies followed thereafter. The early methodologies and Project Management Systems give evidence of the orientation of systems departments of that time: a heavy emphasis on Project Management.
Unfortunately, it was a fallacy that Project Management was the problem; instead people simply didn't know how to design and build systems in a uniform manner. As companies eventually learned, Project Management is useless without a clear road map for how to build something. In the mid-to-late 's several papers and books were published on how to productively design software thus marking the beginning of the "Structured Programming" movement.
This was a large body of work that included such programming luminaries as Barry Boehm, Frederick P. Jackson, Donald E. Knuth, Glenford J. Weinberg, Ed Yourdon, as well as many others. Although their techniques were found useful for developing software, it led to confusion in the field differentiating between systems and software. To many, they were synonymous. In reality, they are not. Software is subordinate to systems, but the growing emphasis on programming was causing a change in perspective.
The only way systems communicate internally or externally to other systems is through shared data; it is the cohesive bond that holds systems and software together. This resulted in the introduction of Data Dictionary technology. The intent of the Data Dictionaries was to uniquely identify and track where data was used in a company's systems.
They included features for maintaining documentation, impact analysis to allow the studying of a proposed change , and redundancy checks. Unlike the other general purpose Data Dictionaries, these products were limited to the confines of the DBMS and didn't effectively track data outside of their scope. There were a few other notable innovations introduced, including IBM's Business Systems Planning BSP which attempted to devise a plan for the types of systems a company needed to operate.
Several other comparable offerings were introduced shortly thereafter. Interestingly, many companies invested heavily in developing such systems plans, yet very few actually implemented them. Program Generators were also introduced during this period.
This included report writers that could interpret data and became a natural part of the repertoire of DBMS products. It also included products that could generate program source code COBOL predominantly from specifications. MBA also introduced a generator of its own in - a Systems generator initially named ADF Automated Design Facility which could automatically design whole systems, complete with an integrated data base.
Not only was it useful as a design tool but it was a convenient tool for documenting existing systems. The only drawback to ADF was that the mindset of the industry was shifting from systems to software. Consequently, program generators captured the imagination of the industry as opposed to ADF. The increase in computer horsepower, coupled with new programming tools and techniques, caused a shift in perspective in MIS organizations.
Now, such departments became dominated by programmers, not systems people. Many managers falsely believed that developers were not being productive unless they were programming. The proliferation of software during this decade was so great that it gave rise to the packaged software industry.
This went far beyond computer utilities and programming tools. It included whole systems for banking, insurance and manufacturing. As a result, companies were inclined to purchase and install these systems as opposed to reinventing the wheel. Among their drawbacks though was that they normally required tailoring to satisfy the customer's needs which represented modification to the program source code.
Further, the customer's data requirements had to be considered to assure there were no conflicts in how the customer used and assigned data. After the package had been installed, the customer was faced with the ongoing problem of modifying and enhancing the system to suit their ever-changing needs.
As big iron grew during the 's and 's, computer manufacturers identified the need for smaller computers to be used by small to medium-sized businesses.
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