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The need for a general data base as an aid to the investigation of organization within the world system has reached the stage at which the existing comprehensive and specialized directories and single purpose surveys are no longer adequate. The equipment currently available and the technological developments promised for the next five to ten years suggest that the possibilities of a sophisticated storage and retrieval system on organizations throughout the world and their interactions should be investigated.

This note identifies some of the uses and possibilities of such a data bank in terms of the probable interests of research workers in the fields of political, social, information and management science and associated disciplines. The applications stressed are those which appear to be important to the control of change within the world system.

An important reason for establishing such a data bank is the tendency to consider the recognized complexity of the world system to be too great to permit any form of unified treatment. Such a view would be encouraged if it proved impossible to represent in a sophisticated model all the entities in the world system and their many types of interaction. Computer display techniques and processing ability are the only means of rapidly conveying a conceptual understanding of the many interactions within the system as a whole. Normal instruction methods, in the case of such complexity, cross so many discipline boundaries that they lend themselves to over-emphasize of one particular feature of the system at the expense of others and an integrated picture of the whole.

Research workers in this field are faced with a situation in which the equipment they need is available and will become increasingly accessible and cheap to use, whereas the relevant data and the techniques required have not been brought together. The practical applications arising from the use of sophisticated research techniques in the study of the world system have therefore received little attention. A note of urgency is introduced into this situation in three ways:

1. - the formats and programme specifications of a number of international information systems, particularly those in the United Nations and Specialized Agencies, are under study at the moment. It is probable that a number of specialized information systems will be proposed and planned over the next few years. Research techniques with important practical applications cannot be envisaged in such systems since they have not yet been developed despite the fact that such systems will collect and store much of' the necessary data on sophisticated processing equipment which could permit many valuable analyses. Once such systems are specified and formats are frozen, there is likely to be considerable resistance to any subsequent changes which would permit more sophisticated analyses once the techniques have been developed.
2. - the United Nations and the Specialized Agencies are an important group of focal bodies for coordination of the world system. The following comment was made in a report submitted by the United States Member of the United Nations Ecosoc Enlarged Committee for Programme and Coordination ('Development of modern management techniques and use of computers' E/AC.51/ GR/L.9, 7 October 1968): '...It has become more and more difficult for any individual, whether in government service or in an international secretariat, to be aware of the totality of the United Nations family programme and activities. This in turn complicates the process of coordination, makes overlapping and duplication more likely. . . ' For lack of a clear picture of the many interacting sub-systems within the world system as a whole - which can only be supplied and communicated as a result of multi-disciplinary research - the solutions currently envisaged by the UN are to be specifically based on its own internal organizational problems, despite acknowledgement of the vital role of some other sub-systems.
3. - the need for sophisticated research techniques is illustrated by the following quote from the introduction to a 1968 management conference session of the College of Management Control Systems (The Institute of Management Sciences). 'Evidence is mounting that the environment which managers seek to control -- or, at least, to guide or restrain -- is increasing in turbulence and complexity at a rate that far exceeds the capacity of management researchers to provide new and improved methodologies to affect management's intentions. Faced with the consequences of force-fed technological change, and the concomitant changes in the social, political, psychological, and theological spheres, there is real danger that the process by which new concepts of management control are invented and developed may itself be out of control relative to the demands that are likely to be imposed upon it .'

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