Senior Managers and Computers

Introduction The history of business computer systems development indicates a trend towards the increasing awareness of the potential for man‐machine synergy in some form. Until the early 1970s, the principal impact of computing had been upon the lower organisational levels and on the more structured tasks of the organisation, but from that time on there has been an increasing movement towards amalgamating computer power and management science in an attempt to aid the decision maker facing complex and unstructured decision tasks. More recently, such a blend has come to be termed a decision support system .