Andrew McCosh - Böcker

Patrick Humphreys Department of Social Psychology London School of Economics and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE. Email: P. Humphreys@lse. ac. uk This book presents a selection of contributions to the conference on Implementing Systems for Supporting Management Decisions: Concepts, Methods, and Experiences held in London in July, 1996. The conference was organized by the International Federation of Infonnation Processing's Working Group 8. 3 on Decision Support Systems and the London School of Economics and Political Science. (LSE). The Programme Committee for the Conference comprised Liam Bannon, University of Limerick; Patrick Humphreys, LSE, co-chairperson; Andrew McCosh, University of Edinburgh; Piero Migliarese, Politecnico di Milano, co- chairperson; Jean-Charles Pomerol, LAFORIA, Universite Paris VI. The chairperson of the organizing committee was Dina Berkeley, LSE. The programme committee members served also as the editors of this book. Each contribution was selected by the editors after peer review and was developed by its authors specifically for inclusion in this volume. Working group 8.3 was formally established in 1981 on the recommendation ofIFIP's Technical Committee on Information Systems (TC8). The scope of the working group covers: "Development of approaches for applying information systems technology to increase the effectiveness of decision makers in situations where the computer system can support and enhance human judgment in the perfonnance of tasks that have elements that cannot be specified in advance.

Managers and decision makers face an escalating challenge in understanding the dynamics of their organizations. A major element in this debate is the nature of linkage, or convergence, between organizational change and transformation, corporate planning and attempts to implement the planning at all levels in the process of transformation, and the role of information technology and systems for decision support and communication in organizations. This book was concieved to address this challenge. It contains papers addressing, especially: frameworks for organizational transformation; issues in corporate growth, upsizing, mergers and acquisitions; and issues in downsizing, privatization, outsourcing and personal innovation.

This volume presents an exploration of this relatively new subject. The book follows two different trails, which eventually are brought together. The first trail is an exploration in Chapters One and Two of the general nature of the finance industry, of the institutions which make it up, of the people in it and the pressures they are under. The first trail also examines the nature of the reward system in the finance industry. The second trail is an examination of the guidance people can obtain from four of the world's great religions on exactly how people ought to behave when engaged in the financial industry. The second part of the book is contained in Chapters Three to Seven. If people propose to advise the financiers to be ethical, it is important to know what is meant by this, and to call upon reliable sources and why they are using the four particular religious sources chosen. The next four chapters extract business and financial commands and one or two important interpretive writings from Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.Part Three of the book (Chapters Eight to Twelve) is a distillation of the concepts from the religions, an application of the concepts to the modern financial world, and a discussion of the various organizational tools which might be used to put them into operation.

Financial Ethics presents an exploration of this relatively new subject. The book will follow two different trails, which eventually are brought together. The first trail is an exploration in Chapters One and Two of the general nature of the finance industry, of the institutions which make it up, of the people in it and the pressures they are under. The first trail also examines the nature of the reward system in the finance industry. The second trail is an examination of the guidance people can obtain from four of the world's great religions on exactly how people ought to behave when engaged in the financial industry. The second part of the book is contained in Chapters Three to Nine. If people propose to advise the financiers to be ethical, it is important to know what is meant by this, and to call upon reliable sources and why they are using the four particular religious sources chosen. The next four chapters extract business and financial commands and one or two important interpretive writings from Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism. Part Three of the book (Chapters Ten to Thirteen) is a distillation of the concepts from the religions, an application of the concepts to the modern financial world, and a discussion of the various organizational tools which might be used to put them into operation.

The main purpose of this paper is to contribute to the discussion about the design of computer and communication systems that can aid the management process. Within this perspective, computer and communication technologies are seen as an amplification of the human data processing capabilities which limit the decision process.