'Too far ahead of its time': Britain, Burroughs and real-time banking in the 1960s

In 1969, the popular British television programme, Tomorrow's World, featured an item that predicted point of sale terminals in every high street shop ushering in the country's computerised cashless economy. The basis for the show's prediction was a succession of ambitious projects initiated by the British banks, each with the aim of introducing a new real-time computer banking system to its network of branches by 15 February 1971. The banks, threatened by state-sponsored competition, inspired by the success of SABRE, American Airlines' real-time airline reservations system, and pressured by forthcoming decimalisation, all chose 'D-Day' as their immovable deadline. And, in each case, US computer manufacturer, Burroughs, promised a B8500 central super computer linked to a nationwide network of TC500 intelligent terminal satellites. Perhaps unsurprisingly for Tomorrow's World, the programme's predicted coming of the cashless society was wildly optimistic. But so too, it turned out, were the plans of the banks. Real-time banking in Britain never materialised in the 1970s, let alone by February 1971, as one by one the banks abandoned their plans. In this paper, I revisit the case of Burroughs and Barclays Bank. Blending oral testimonies with archival sources, I explore a consumer perspective of coterminous computing labour as the two companies set about making the idea of real-time banking a reality. I reveal how a community of practice made up of Barclays' computer programmers and Burroughs' engineers was able to transgress established business boundaries in pursuit of a technical ideal, only to eventually become architect of its own fate. The co-construction and 'interpretive flexibility' of this technological failure is considered in light of the existing literature, with particular attention given to the attribution of blame. In this case, where there was attribution, it was judged to have lain with the technology, which was simply regarded as 'too far ahead of its time.ï¿

Paving the Way to Simpler: Experiencing from Maximizing Enrollment States in Streamlining Eligibility and Enrollment

Since 2009, the eight states (Alabama, Illinois, Louisiana, Massachusetts, New York, Utah, Virginia, and Wisconsin) participating in the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Maximizing Enrollment program have worked to streamline and simplify enrollment systems, policies, and processes for children and those eligible for health coverage in 2014. The participating states aimed to reduce enrollment barriers for consumers and administrative burdens in processing applications and renewals for staff by making improvements and simplifications at every step of the enrollment process. Although the states began their work before the enactment of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), their efforts positioned them well for implementation in 2014, and offer experiences and lessons that other states may find useful in their efforts to improve efficiency, lower costs, and promote responsible stewardship of limited public resources

Team to Market (T2M): Creating High Performance Teams in the Digital Age

1. Teams are the essential means of product or service delivery and the fundamental building blocks of modern organisations. An effective team can produce results far outperforming a collection of even the most talented individuals when team members coalesce and jell into a single, well-functioning, fully-aligned organism. This report advances the notion of “Team to Market” (T2M) to help business leaders and knowledge workers understand, create and lead high performance teams in the digital age

Developing Strategies of Organizational Sustainability for Solo and Small Business Medical Practices

Recent trends point toward a decline in solo and small business medical practices, yet, the need and demand still exists for this model of health care. The purpose of this case study was to explore effective approaches to help physicians in solo practice and small medical group primary care practitioners (PCPs) retain their small business medical practices. The study included purposive sampling and face-to-face interviews: 11 physicians, predominately primary care practitioners, in the Baltimore-Washington metropolitan region, were interviewed until data saturation was reached. A component of systems theory (strategic thinking) and the dynamic capabilities concept were used to frame the study. Audio recordings were transcribed and analyzed to identify themes regarding effective competitive approaches to help small medical group physicians retain their practices. Four major themes emerged: need for flexibility and adaptability, need for higher levels of business acumen, need to fully embrace automation, and a focus on pursuing financial stability before pursuing growth and expansion of the medical practice. Results may benefit society by preserving and strengthening a source of patient-centered, effective, affordable health care for communities served by small business medical practices. Implications for social change include presenting methods to enhance stability and organizational sustainability of small business medical practices

Autonomous Exchanges: Human-Machine Autonomy in the Automated Media Economy

Contemporary discourses and representations of automation stress the impending “autonomy” of automated technologies. From pop culture depictions to corporate white papers, the notion of autonomous technologies tends to enliven dystopic fears about the threat to human autonomy or utopian potentials to help humans experience unrealized forms of autonomy. This project offers a more nuanced perspective, rejecting contemporary notions of automation as inevitably vanquishing or enhancing human autonomy. Through a discursive analysis of industrial “deep texts” that offer considerable insights into the material development of automated media technologies, I argue for contemporary automation to be understood as a field for the exchange of autonomy, a human-machine autonomy in which autonomy is exchanged as cultural and economic value. Human-machine autonomy is a shared condition among humans and intelligent machines shaped by economic, legal, and political paradigms with a stake in the cultural uses of automated media technologies. By understanding human-machine autonomy, this project illuminates complications of autonomy emerging from interactions with automated media technologies across a range of cultural contexts

Getting the Haves to Come out Behind: Fixing the Distributive Injustices of American Health Care

Hyman criticizes an article by Havighurst and Richman regarding the distributive injustices of US health care. Hyman also offers a guide for implementing policy reforms based on the analysis by Havighurst and Richman

Getting the Haves to Come out Behind: Fixing the Distributive Injustices of American Health Care

Hyman criticizes an article by Havighurst and Richman regarding the distributive injustices of US health care. Hyman also offers a guide for implementing policy reforms based on the analysis by Havighurst and Richman

Managing suppliers for collection development: the UK higher education perspective

This chapter follows the adoption of the new procurement discipline by academic libraries since the demise of the NBA. It first examines the standard procurement cycle, with particular reference to libraries and book supply. It then discusses library purchasing consortia and their contribution to managing and developing the library market place for books, identifying three phases of operation. It closes with some reflections on the future prospects of collection development. Traditional collection development is seen as being turned on its head – we no longer seek to collect the huge range of works of scholars of all other institutions in order to make them available to the (relatively) small number of our own scholars; instead we collect the works of our own and make them available to all