Organisational Change

6.6.4 System Skills

There is much more to this than learning about computers, although most people employed in today's world of work do need to learn about computer-based information systems. For now, let us just say that a system is an arrangement of resources and routines intended to produce specified results. To organise is to arrange. A system reflects organisation and, by the same token, an organisation is a system.

A word processing operator and the word processing equipment operated form a system. So do computers and the larger, information processing systems in which computers are so often embedded. These are generally known as “hard” systems. There are “soft” systems as well: compensation systems, appraisal systems, promotion systems, ...