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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Background information on this title & author--not a rating,
By Jevons & Hollerith Books (Columbia, MD USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Automation (Hardcover)
John Diebold wrote widely for the computer trade press and on industrial management in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. He established one of the first technology consultancies (The Diebold Group) to publish regular reports on then-current computing technology.
At the time this book was written, Diebold was still employed as a management consultant for Griffenhagen and Associates of Chicago. Initially, he was known primarily for "Making the automatic factory a reality", a well-received and widely serialized paper authored when he was a graduate student in Professor Georges Doriot's course on manufacturing at the Harvard Business School. Diebold received his MBA from Harvard in 1951 and "Automation" was published a year later, dedicated to Doriot. It pre-dates any widespread use of computers by industry and offers a blueprint for how and where they might be useful. It was reprinted by the American Management Association in 1983 and then again ten afterwards (see http://www.hbs.edu/entrepreneurship/newbusiness/2002spring_2.html and Diebold's 1965 biography by Wilbur Cross). In a prefatory note to the book, Diebold explains that he had adopted the coinage "automation" as a shortened version of "automatization", noting that it is both less awkward and less prone to spelling errors. Unlike several of his later books which were essentially collections of Diebold's speechs and shorter papers, this book is a relatively unified monograph. Diebold concentrates on the business uses of automation rather than the technical details and there are some howlers, such as the claim that Babbage's difference engine would have been an analogue computer. However, his chapters on possible factory and office operations that might be ripe for automation still look quite reasonable after fifty years. These chapters constitute a preliminary attempt at systems analysis, conducted before anyone had a formal name for it, much less the needed methodology. In the final two chapters, Diebold speculates on automation's effect on business and its larger social and economic impact, a harder task to perform well.
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