About this issue

IN THE PAST decade there has been a rapid growth of new staff activities in large organizations performing Research, Development, and Engineering (R, D, &E). The range of titles given to these groups is adequately represented in the affiliations of authors in these TRANSACTIONS during the past few years. They include “systems analysis,” “operations research,” “management sciences,” “data processing,” “cost effectiveness,” etc., etc., etc. A major goal of many of these groups is the achievement of an organization-wide system of data generation, storage, and transmittal that will assist in managerial decision-making and control of operations. A number of such systems or partial systems have been described in past issues (see, for example, Vazsonyi and Liff, December, 1963; Schaidt, and Williams and Wilson, September, 1963).