Systems will be people too

In the few decades that computers have been used by society, our perception of them and their uses has developed several times: computation machine, data processing system, and information processing system. Another development is occurring today: the process support system. By 2001 this development will itself be established and become the basis for the next development in the continuing evolution of our use of machines. To date, we have concentrated on satisfying the information needs of the individual. In the coming years, those information needs will still have to be satisfied, but increasingly within a much larger context, that of the group carrying out a business process. The challenge for the late 1990s is to develop the systematic methods that will take us from requirements to group support system in a reliable and predictable way, in the same way that the structured methods of the 1970s worked for our data- and information-oriented systems