COMPUTERIZATION: A PRECONDITION FOR, OR A PRODUCT OF, RESPONSIBLE SOCIAL WORK PRACTICE

The march of time is relentless; it brings with it ever increasing technological innovations that cannot bypass or skip over the delivery of personal social services. Within these services, the computer has already found its way to management and research personnel. They itch to put it to use to crunch out the kind of data that they feel they need in order to deliver more cost‐effective services to higher priority targets. The fly in the ointment is the practitioners; they just cannot or will not produce reliable data of the type needed for the number crunchers.