The Manager′s Guide to Systems Practice

Frank Stowell: Is Emeritus Professor of Systems and Information Systems at the University of Portsmouth. He has extensive management experience both within the university sector, e.g.he was director of campus at De Montfort University, Milton Keynes and within central government as a consultant within a Management Systems Development Group. He has a PhD in Organisational Change and his research interests are in participative methods of problem definition. He is chair of the Systems Practice for Managing Complexity network, (http://www.spmc.org.uk/) which is concerned with providing workshops for managers interested in learning about ways of addressing and managing change. He is past President of the UK Academy of Information Systems and the UK Systems Society (http://www.ukss.org.uk/), is a board member of the world cybernetics organisation and is presently the chair of the Council of Information Systems Professors. He has supervised a number of research projects including modelling complex decision-making in mental health care. He has published papers and texts in the field and presented papers at a number of international conferences in Europe and the United States. Prior to his academic career he was employed by central government as a member of a small team of management consultants.