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Systems analysis, which is also called cost/benefit analysis, the planning-programming-budgeting system, risk analysis, and technology assessment, has become the major planning and policy tool of government at all levels. Indeed, it is still gathering momentum in addressing the uncertainties associated with everything from the safety of nuclear energy to the effects of microelectronics. Examining this phenomenon critically, Ida R. Hoos reviews systems analytic techniques in their own circumscribed, simulated world and in the real one, drawing on a wide range of studies in health, education, welfare, crime, and many other areas of public concern, and giving special attention to information systems and databanks. In a new introduction and a new final chapter, Hoos expands her 1972 discussion to consider the ways in which systems analysis, now dominant, governs our present and determines our future. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1972

Mitroff's proposal that we exercise all our wits and not just half of them, i.e. the portion presumed to reside in the left hemisphere of the brain, is indisputable. One would like to conclude from the scenario that he has drawn that (a) management information systems are not necessarily synonymous with managerial knowhow; (b) there is no magic in macro‐models; and (c) the computer, despite having achieved Man‐of‐the‐Year status on the cover of Time, cannot father a daughter (to whom marriage at one time would have assured swift ascent in a business career). But I am not sure that this is Mitroff's message nor am I clear as to what it really is, for although he starts out by agreeing with me, that society may be getting the short end of a Faustian bargain with respect to information technology, his line of argument veers off in a direction that would logically lead to a very different conclusion. If I read him correctly, he looks more to the machine than to the man in the man/machine relationship. He wants us to build better men via machine so that electronic games, Disneylands, and other such contrivances will provide us with more salubrious feedback in the way of improved information about everything from the workings of our private psyche to the running of our business.

Now that the computer has taken over the office and, incidentally, has changed the structure, contours, and dynamics of the business world, there is urgent need for a dispassionate assessment of what has been going on for the past quarter century and what is ongoing now, with the fateful 1984 a flip of the calendar away and the turn of the century not far off. An assessment of that kind would not have been possible in 1960, when the Harvard Business Review first printed the article, "When the Computer Takes Over the Office". (Subsequently, it was distributed under the aegis of the University of California's Institute of Industrial Relations as part of their reprint series.) At the time, electronic data processing was still in its infancy and regarded as a mere timorous technological step beyond tried‐and‐true Hollerith systems. Talk of "takeover" must have seemed like an egregious flying in the face of conventional wisdom. What, after all, could be so threatening about a fast abacus? All it was doing was, presumably, cutting down paper work or speeding up paper flow. Then, as now, the electronics industry was self‐conscious about its public image and welcomed only praise for its noble contributions to society's wellbeing. Any intimation that automation was not an unmitigated blessing for all people was regarded as a manifestation of an unfriendly predisposition against progress, perhaps even subversive and un‐American. One manufacturer went so far as to demand, in an open letter to the press, that the editors of the Harvard Business Review repudiate the Hoos article. A reply was in order and mine was simple: it is not my business to peddle nor to soft‐pedal automation.