Some Thoughts on Automation in a British Office

Abstract

ACCORDING to classical economic theory, when a businessman makes a decision about the future progress of his firm, there are at least three elements in the making of a rationalchoice. He is faced with a given set of alternative courses of action. Each of these has a set of consequences. He has a system of preferences by which to rank and to choose one of them by joint consideration of the course of action and its consequences in terms of business profit. In a recent article' it has been suggested that these three elements are frequently not met with in practice. The alternatives are not in any sense given, and, indeed, the search for them is a part of the process of the business decision. Similarly the consequences are not given and part of making a rational choice consists in deciding to find out as much as possible about the consequences of each alternative course of action. The comparisons are not made only on the basis of profit, but in terms of intangible consequences, too. This makes the determination of a single 'best' alternative well nigh impossible, and what is sought instead is a satisfactory solution in that it satisfies a goal and even some subsidiary goals. Even the problem itself, about which a decision is to be made, is not part of 'the given', and the search for problems of varying difficulty was thought by the authors to be an organizational task. A firm is presented with these problems by the possibility of introducing 'automation', that is, automatic handling and making or processing things, including clerical information, automatically. Automation is often said to be a method of carrying out new company tasks, or of doing the old tasks more rapidly, and a way of saving labour and sometimes other costs. 2 The aim of this paper is to attempt to shed light on managerial decisions to introduce innovations by reconstructing some aspects of such a major decision made by a company. The decision was to adopt automation for some of its clerical operations.