ABSTRACT
This chapter presents some key concepts about how organisations as a whole behave. A variety of forces will be seen to be responsible for shaping the particular ways in which an organisation structures itself and generally behaves. These have great implications for the ways in which and speed at which new office technology will be implemented, as well as its consequences, and the chapter briefly examines some of these key societal forces. It explores the implications of all of this for organisational effectiveness and productivity. The central characteristic of the office is that it has information as both its main input and its main output. The major function within this process is to transform input information into the kind of information which will be useful to either internal or external decision-makers, or will facilitate some type of transaction or behaviour. Office information technology can completely take over the decision-making process only for the first type (computational) of decisions.
