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Managers have mainly used microcomputer programs to handle and communicate known data and information more efficently. However, information is only valuable if it actually helps people make more effective decisions within the time they have available to them, and no managers ever have enough time.

The issues may seem intractable, resources may be scarce and time may be running out, but decision insight systems produce reliable decisions fast, from raw views and whatever facts are available. This article illustrates how personnel managers in business and public services use these unique microcomputer systems to make their decisions and allocate their scare resources more effectively.

U.S. Social Services How different are American personal social services from merged services in Britain. Dispersed, freelance agencies fight over clients in communities atomised by ethnic discord. Neither Seebohm‐style welfare legislation currently blocked in Congress, nor experiments in Connecticut, Michigan, or Washington, will achieve unified accountability structures as has happened here. In the United States, integration demands co‐ordinated inter‐agency information and decisions at operating level.

Forthcoming Reorganisations Inter‐Authority working parties develop programmes for forthcoming Local Government reorganisation. Elaborate Health Service reorganisation plans are formulated. Schools are merged to form comprehensives. Central Government reshuffles frequently involve merging or demerging whole departments, and Common Market entry will eventually lead to some synthesis of services and policies at continental levels of operation. Many European countries approach major Social Services mergers—for example, the Dutch are soon to take action on Seebohm‐style report called “Structural Perspective”, and the 1970 Danish Social Steering Act is equivalent to the 1970 British Social Services Act, except that it allows for a four‐year changeover period. The Swedes continue to test integrated service delivery at neighbourhood level along the lines of such famous experiments as the Tierp commune block in Uppsala. Many European countries are in throes of Maud‐type Local Government reorganisations, which Italy embarked on in April 1972, and Britain is to embark in April 1974. The public sector is evidently moving through a period of major mergers as scepticism about 1960s' industrial conglomeration prompts the Government's fair trading legislation promising new merger evaluation methods. General principles about merging public services begin to emerge. Relevant data derives from British Social Services' reorganisation following the Seebohm Report, London Local Government reorganisation, American and Australian state‐level experiments in service integration incorporated under Allied Services legislation and various service industry mergers. Merger theory is still in its infancy, even that part which derives from industrial experience the degree of potential upheaval in public services reorganisations demands that fullest possible use be made of our existing understanding of what may occur when two or more organisations merge.

THERE ARE WOMEN engineers in every facet of that ubiquitous motley of professions that claim (sometimes with but little justification) to that title. There are, too, women politicians, women surgeons and physicians, women accountants, architects and one was recently appointed as Editor of a national newspaper.

NEXT TO banking, we are informed, Business Consultancy is the most favoured profession for graduates in the United States and it is likely, as in so much else, that here in Britain the same trend will be followed. It follows, as the famous query in a one‐time quiz member put it, that ‘it all depends on what you mean by Business Consultancy’.