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EVERY OTHER MONTH the Institute of Directors writes to a representative section of its membership, 200 in all. They are asked their opinion of the economy in general and how the immediate future looks to them.

The paper reviews literature that claims that for the first two decades of its existence, the computer industry was insular, esoteric and disproportionately populated by men. It cites feminist and industry commentary that claims that these sub‐cultural features have had a negative impact on information systems (IS∥ development, and that because they possess more rounded profiles ‐‐ typically possessing both social as well as technical skills ‐‐ the advent of more women into the sector would lead to improvements in design and golden opportunities for female developers. The paper discusses qualitative interview data elicited from developers designed to assess the likelihood of these predictions holding true. Specifically, it discusses the common‐sense discourses deployed to represent male and female workers’ social and technical skills. It concludes that the processes whereby both types of skills are recognised are highly complex and that such processes often privilege male workers and their competencies, so that we should remain sceptical of any over‐optimistic predictions that a shift in the quantities of women undertaking IS work will automatically lead to a shift in the qualitative nature of such systems and the contexts within which they are produced.

The accurate estimation of equipment utilization is very important in capital‐intensive industry since the identification and analysis of hidden time losses are initiated from these estimates. In this paper, a new loss classification scheme for computing the overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) is presented for capital‐intensive industry. Based on the presented loss classification scheme, a new interpretation for OEE including state analysis, relative loss analysis, lost unit analysis and product unit analysis is attempted. Presents a methodology for constructing a data collection system and developing the total productivity improvement visibility system to implement the proposed OEE and related analyses.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework and prototype software to use IDEF3 descriptions as a knowledge base from which a queuing network (QN) analysis is performed to compute system performance measures as part of quick response manufacturing. This intends to help domain experts obtain informative quantitative performance measures such as resource utilization, waiting time, and cycle time without relying on a time consuming simulation approach.

A general open queuing network is used to extract the related resource information from the process knowledge captured by IDEF3 method. The relational database is used to integrate the open QN and IDEF3, which also improves the knowledge reusability. In addition, the performance of the open queuing network analyzer (QNA) is compared to the simulation through case studies.

The domain experts usually do not own much technical modeling knowledge. However, through this integration, it is found that they could obtain several meaningful system performance measures without simulation. They could also perform the diverse “what if” scenario analyses with this prototype without difficulties. It is another finding that the system performance measures generated by the open QNA are reasonably close to the values obtained from simulation, articularly when the system utilization is low.

The open QN analysis used in this integration is not as generic as the simulation approach in terms of the modeling scope and capability. Hence, this integration supports only the exclusive OR (XOR) out of three junctions in IDEF3 grammars.

Some system analysis problems do not require a complex simulation modeling approach. Domain experts need a modeling tool to quickly obtain some system dynamics and insights. This integration framework suffices those requirements.

This paper describes the first attempt to generate informative system performance measures from the IDEF3 model using the open QN. It also offers practical help to the domain experts working in the system analysis area.

AS ALWAYS, at this the beginning of a New Year, we are incurably optimistic. Our credo can be summed up in one word: chiliasm, a belief that times will get better.

THAT, TO BE SURE, was the cry of the lookout man on the old style whaler before the days when those creatures were found to be an endangered species and steps taken internationally to safeguard them. It was the cry when the harpoon was sharpened and got ready to fire into the soft body of the victim.

ALMOST EVERY communication we receive from manufacturers or suppliers, whether sent direct or from professional public relations companies, claims that the firm concerned is the most important firm in its category.

WE MAKE NO apologies for taking Thomas Paine's classic title for our leader this month. Written all but 200 years ago, it was brought vividly to mind when we read letters in a contemporary journal. From two well‐qualified men in their early fifties, they regretted they could obtain no replies to many applications for employment. They were, all too evidently, considered “too old at 50'.

WE WERE LISTENING, some time ago, to a television debate on old age. Mostly the speakers seemed convinced that it was something to look forward to, that a senior citizen (as they call them nowadays) is a sort of privileged person, able to spend his time on hobbies or take repeated holidays in glamorous far‐away places.