5.1 The Office

Much of the work that is carried out in offices can be characterized as: the management of records, the analysis of data, and the preparation of documents (reports, letters, etc.). The last of these was discussed previously, so the others will be considered here.

Offices tend to accumulate information, on students, employees, customers, suppliers, etc. Management of this information includes adding more information, updating existing information, deleting obsolete information and retrieving information on a given topic. Using computers for these tasks has several advantages:

• computer records can be rapidly searched to retrieve information;
• computer records can be accessed remotely with no human intervention -- for example, if a member of staff needs information on some subject, he can retrieve it directly from the central records using his own office computer, without requiring the staff of the records office to gather and copy the appropriate data;
• computer records can be easily archived for secure storage (for example, they can be dumped to tape and the tape held in a fire-proof safe in another building);
• the records can be processed to automatically generate reports (such as a list of all outstanding bills);
• computer records generally take up less space than paper records;
• computer records can be readily fed to other computer systems for analysis (that is, once the information is in electronic form, it can be readily used by any computer program).

It should be noted that the management and analysis of records is not confined to the office. Similar activities are carried out by hospitals, by police forces, by government intelligence services, by scientists (on research results), etc. In these latter cases, the analysis is often of a speculative nature: the computer may be used to assess the validity of some hypothesis or to identify correlations in the data.