FREE online courses on Change Management - Change Management - The Skill Requirements - System Skills

 

There's 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's just say that a system is an arrangement of resources and routines intended to produce specified results. To organize is to arrange. A system reflects organization and, by the same token, an organization 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, and reward and incentive systems.

 

There are two sets of systems skills to be mastered:

 

The first is the set most people associate with computers and it is exemplified by “systems analysis.” This set of skills, by the way, actually predates the computer and is known elsewhere (particularly in the United States Air Force and the aerospace industry) as “systems engineering.” For the most part, the kind of system with which this skill set concerns itself is a “closed” system which, for now, we can say is simply a mechanistic or contrived system with no purpose of its own and incapable of altering its own structure. In other words, it cannot learn and it cannot change of its own volition.

 

The second set of system skills is the set associated with a body of knowledge generally referred to as General Systems Theory (GST). This set deals with people, organizations, industries, economies, and even nations as socio-technical systems - as “open,” purposive systems, carrying out transactions with other systems and bent on survival, continuance, prosperity, dominance, plus a host of other goals and objectives.