Can A Programming Language help the management professional?

APL in management information by ADRIAN FLETCHER

here are two reasons to use a

T computer in a business task. First, you may have a vast quan-

tity of data records which need to be dealt with in a fairly simple manner; or, second, you may have a relatively small database which you want to subject to complex analysis. It’s not particularly difficult to calculate a month’s payslip from a basic salary figure and a set of rules; but when you have hundred or thousands of employees it’s a task which the com- puter can do far faster than any human team. And the computer doesn’t get bored. The amount of data in a model of the British economy or the world petroleum market can be relatively small; what counts is the expertise of the professional analyst in deciding what calculations need to be performed, and the ability of the computer to do them quickly.

Batch processing

Data processing departments are geared to processing data - to the first type of task rather than the second. Their basic role is to produce the company’s invoices, cheques, pay- slips, and the like. Their systems have to use the central computer reason-

A bstruct: The need for rapid and reliable management information systems will increase still further as the business world becomes more &omplex. The paper considers what computers need to be able to do to help the management professional, and assesses the APL. programming language to see how far it meets those requirements.

Keywords: data processing, computer languages, management information systems.

Adrian Fletcher is sales engineer with Micro APL.

ably efficiently just to get through an ever-increasing volume of transac- tions. Batch systems are vital to the company’s operations, and cannot be allowed to go wrong, so changes, which often have unexpected destabi- lizing effects, are regarded with ex- treme suspicion, and every new deve- lopment is subjected to rigorous test- ing. The systems are written in lan- guages which are made fairly machine-efficient by leaving a fair amount of work in the programmer’s hands; so any development has to be done by skilled, scarce, and costly specialists. Users complain that they are quoted ‘six man months’ as a minimum requirement to perform any task at all.

Some of these problems may be avoidable, others are inevitable where lots of transactions have to be pro- cessed reliably to satisfy customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders, taxmen, auditors, etc. But one thing is certain; the habits of mind which go with volume data processing are in- appropriate for the second type of task. New skills, new attitudes, and (not least) new languages are needed for systems which perform heavy analysis on relatively little data. Oper- ational research systems, decision support systems and management in- formation systems are examples of such systems.

Management information analysis

The management information analyst is doing a speculative job. Unlike the payroll program, the system will rare- ly be definitely right or wrong; its aim is to achieve the best possible guess about what’s going to happen next. If the system takes so long to develop

that the“ event arrives before the prediction, it is not a lot of use. To produce the best guess involves selec- tion and synthesis from many possible guesses. Provided the analyst can be decoupled from everybody else’s CPU needs, then machine efficiency is not an issue; we’re not performing the same processes over and, over again. What is needed is a people-efficient language, one in which the analyst can specify what he/she wants done in brief but precise terms, and then let the computer get on with it.

One language that may fill this role is APL - A Programming Language. The acronym comes from the title of a paper written by the Canadian mathe- matician Ken Iverson in 1961. When the paper was published, Iverson had no thought of using the notation he’d created as a computer language; what he had produced was a revised, re- formed, and extended mathematical notation to enable people to write

16 0011-684X/84/030016-02$03.00 @ 1984 Butterworth & Co (Publishers) Ltd. dasa processing

systems

down procedures on paper. Another mathematical language, FORTRAN,

derived its name from the words ‘Formula Translation’, that wouldn’t be a bad description of APL, except that the level of translation needed from standard maths is far less.

APL has gained from being widely marketed as a mainframe personal computing tool by IRM, but in the process it has become associated with the traditional disadvantages of the mainframe approach. Response is of- ten slow, the service is available only when the DP manager says so, and IBM’s VSAPL product still lacks

significant enhancements found in most other interpreters, most notably in the area of filing. Once APL users turned to timesharing bureaux to avoid these problems; now, the 16 bit processor allows full APL to be offered on machines such as the IBM

Personal Computer and the Apple Lisa, as well as on larger, multiuser machines. The individual or depart-

mental APL computer is an economic

reality. So it looks as if APL matches the

needs of the MIS analyst rather nicely - in theory. How does it work out in practice? My own company’s custom- ers are using APL for all types of work, from clinical trials of pharma-

ceuticals through oil refinery model- ling and control of bottling in a Dutch brewery, to an agricultural census in

the South Pacific. Others use APL specifically for

MIS work. One highly diversified British company uses two APL mi- cros at its head office in order to

consolidate management accounts

from subsidiaries and present the results in graphical form to the Board. The subsidiary companies have simi-

lar installations for their own internal reporting. One of Britain’s major banks has developed an APL system to protect exporters from currency

fluctuations; the program keeps track of outstanding orders and of the company’s foreign currency holdings to enable a corporate treasurer to minimize the risk of loss. And in Sweden, a reinsurance company is running an APL model on a 68000- based computer to show how profit-

ability in its competitive market varies under different conditions.

For management information sys- tems, speed of development and ease of change are often vital. As powerful computers become cheaper, the bene- fits of APL will become more obvious. cl

Micro APL Limited, Unit lF, Nine Elms Industrial Estate, 87 Kirtling Street, London SW8 5BP, UK. Tel: 01-622 0395.

Management of personal computers Continued from page 8

occur: different ways of handling

document processing can be deve- loped; interorganizational com- munication processes can change radically if many people have access to electronic messaging. Training and/or ret.raining. People

are a valuable resource. They are also flexible. With proper training they can adapt to new technologies and be productive. Development of appropriate training programs - both in process and content - will be a critical management task. Support for experimentation and innovation in new ways of work- ing. Different forms of work cen- tered around information proces- sing can be designed at the local work-group and even individual level to an extent never possible before. But it means that managers have to be willing to experiment. Development and use of technical expertise. There are a wide range of technical issues to resolve along with the management issues. The

changes in technology have caught many in the data processing pro- fession unprepared. There are few people who have expertise or ex-

perience with microcomputers. Demands for assistance with data communications, computer net- working, equipment selection and implementation, and software development go beyond the cur-

rent capability of many MISiDP departments. This kind of exper- tise needs to be developed very quickly.

Beyond simply developing the expertise, ways must be found to make it available to the technically naive end-users, the department and work-group managers. These groups will be looking for help from the experts, not unilateral decision making and control.

The time is now

A host of products for using micros in mainframe environments are being developed and marketed by vendors. These products, ranging from data

communications software, to terminal

emulators for personal computers, to local area networks, all offer solutions to some of the more complex techno- logical problems presented by the personal computer as organizational tool.

Yet, without some guidelines for the development, selection and implc- mentation of new technologies, orga- nizations may see only a hodge-podge of partial solutions that don’t match each other and serve only to make computing less productive. The reso- lution of management issues first will provide the kind of guidelines neces- sary to ensure that personal comput- ing will not become a major organiza- tional problem. Formulation of a new partnership between professional in- formation systems and data proces- sing managers, and the user-managers in their organizations will help assure that personal computing becomes the great enhancer of organizational pro- ductivity that its promise offers. Cl

Ungermann-Bass Inc., 2560 Mission Boulevard, Santa Clara, CA 95050, USA. Tel: (408) 496 01 I I.

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