ABSTRACT
Supervisors have long been regarded as a problem by organisational practitioners in the UK. Child and Partridge argue that supervisors have become ‘lost managers’, who, instead of being able to set the parameters and targets within which they work, have these set by functional specialists and senior managers. This chapter illustrates how the adoption of new computer-based technologies can lead to an erosion of supervisory roles. It also illustrates the need for organisational practitioners to tackle the problems by discussing empirical examples drawn from a series of case studies. The introduction of computer-based systems present the opportunity to redesign a range of roles within supervisory systems around the task of information management. The chapter argues that the need for practitioners to seriously consider the problems of organisational choice in the redesign of supervisory systems is further highlighted by the apparent potential for a new type of information manager role.
