ABSTRACT

Computer Science is hard pressed in the US to show broad utility to help justify billion dollar research programs and the value of educating well over 40,000 Bachelor of Science and Master of Science specialists annually in the U.S. The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the U.S. National Research Council has recently issued a report, "Computing the Future (Hartmanis and Lin, 1992)" which sets a new agenda for Computer Science. The report recommends that Computer Scientists broaden their conceptions of the discipline to include computing applications and domains to help understand them. This short paper argues that many Computer Science graduates need some skills in analysing human organisations to help develop appropriate systems requirements since they are trying to develop high performance computing applications that effectively support higher performance human organisations. It is time for academic Computer Science to embrace organisational analysis (the field of Organisational Informatics) as a key area of research and instruction.