Rob Kling
Computer science in the US is hard pressed to show broad utility to help justify billion-dollar research programs and the value of educating well over 40,000 bachelor of science and master of science specialists annually. The Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the US National Research Council recently issues a report, Computing the Future (CTF), which sets a new agenda for computer science. The report recommends that computer scientists broaden their conceptions of the discipline to include computing applications and domains to help understand them. However, many computer science graduates need some skills in analyzing human organizations to help develop appropriate systems requirements, because they are trying to develop high-performance computing applications that effectively support higher performance human organizations. It is time for academic computer science to embrace organizational analysis as a key area of research and instruction.