Office Automation in the University: Administrative Issues

Abstract

The primary intellectual activities within universities may be described as the creation, storage, transformation, and dissemination of information. Automated text processing (ATP) systems can facilitate these processes in addition to supporting standard functions usually associated with office automation projects. The major administrative issues include shared control of expensive components of the total ATP environment, communications standards, pricing policies, equipment acquisition procedures, and centralized versus decentralized management. Since the ATP Center is a cost recovery operation, users evaluate their alternatives and use the service based on rational cost-benefit analyses. An administrative issue at CMU and many other universities is the difference in the philosophy for allocating general computing service from that used for other resources such as the ATP Center. Some areas within CMU have enough text processing work to justify a decentralized departmental computer system with communication links to both the ATP and the Computation Centers.