About this issue

BY THE KIND of strange queuing coincidence that makes editors wonder, all five of the papers in this issue deal with either computers, systems analysis, or mathematical treatments of management decision and control problems. The coincidence is that most of our issues contain a mixture of papers across different aspects of the management of Research. Development, and Engineering (RD&E) and a mixture of approaches — verbal, quantitative; scientific, intuitive; descriptive, prescriptive. What is not strange is the trend toward more and more attempts by managers and their staffs (two of the five papers are from nonacademic organizations) to attack problems of RD&E management through the formal methods of operations research, systems analysis, and statistical analysis.