ABSTRACT
Effective control of the costs and benefits of computerisation is a responsibility at many levels in the organisation. It is clear that individual projects must be properly evaluated and controlled, but the whole basis for control at this level can be undermined if the right organisational policies are not established. In undertakings which are organised into autonomous divisions it is not unusual to find that each division has its own data processing department. In a company which has a genuinely divisionalised structure, it may be sensible for data processing policies to be developed at divisional level. The costs of a data processing department are not confined to the hardware alone. In order to simplify control in a multi-divisional organisation, the central management will often encourage, and stress, the concept of local autonomy. Once having established a need for the development of local systems, there are a variety of ways of organising the relationships between central and local data processing functions.
