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An information society is one in which informational (or interactional) as opposed to material entities represent the dominant form of social and economic transaction. This paper argues that in such an information-rich environment, the conventional view of the systems approach may no longer be relevant, and may in fact be a serious barrier to the development and implementation of creative management technologies. We present an alternative perspective on the systems approach that emphasizes the primacy of informational concepts as opposed to the primacy of matter/energy concepts. This alternative focuses on interactions, on the logic of change, on circular causality, and on multiple concepts of time. There are important implications for organizational design, managerial control and information systems.

Despite a history of successful applications to operational-level problems, the vale of OR/MS modelling techniques as aids in policy/strategy formulation has not been widely demonstrated. In this paper, we suggest that the language of traditional OR/MS model structures is too restrictive to deal with issues typically confronted in policy-making. Differences between operational-level decision-making processes and policy/strategy formulation processes are discussed; alternative model structures are described and classified; and a modelling language for addressing issues of policy and strategy is proposed. The language is presented in set-theoretic terms, and the resulting structure implies that certain model classes accommodate policy-level management needs better than others. Furthermore, policy-level models must serve a role distinct from the prediction and optimization role typically served by operational-level models.

The use of "optimality" as an operational research criterion is insufficiently discriminating. Ample evidence exists that for many problems simple optimization (particularly profit maximization) does not represent the aims of management. In this paper we discuss the nature of the problem situations for which alternative decision criteria are more appropriate. In particular the structure of strategic planning problems is analysed. The provisional commitment involved in a plan (in contrast to the irrevocable commitment of a decision) leads to the development of a particular criterion, robustness—a measure of the flexibility which an initial decision of a plan maintains for achieving near-optimal states in conditions of uncertainty. The robustness concept is developed through the case study of a sequential factory location problem.