Furthermore, using their scientific knowledge, the scientists expected to
be able to develop measures that would give as adequate information as
possible about the performance of the system. More recently, however,
the systems approach has been applied as a managerial innovation in a
variety of situations and problems (political, economic, social, military,
and industrial). These systematic procedures can be, and have been, em-
ployed in designing training systems.

The purpose of this chapter is to present an overview of several training
systems models, a generalized, integrated, and conceptual picture of the
major steps to plan, design, develop, conduct, and evaluate a training
system. Toward this end, the chapter will highlight the importance of
viewing the development of training from a systems perspective.

The development of an organizational training system requires an ex-
amination of many systemic issues. A training system is linked to other
organizational units and must be taken into consideration in each step of
the training process. In turning to the task of this chapter it is important
first to develop a definition of a system.

What is a system? Gane ( 1972) has provided one definition of a system:
a set of elements which, with some objectives, uses processes to transform
inputs into outputs. To define such a system one needs to define four
things--the inputs, the outputs, the processes, and, most importantly, the
objectives. Thus an engineering system, say a generating plant, has coal
as its principal input, and transforms it into electric power as output. The
objective is to do so with the greatest possible efficiency, and the processes
may be burning the coal to raise steam and using the steam to turn the
turbine, which rotates the generator armature.

A data-processing system may have inputs of rates of pay, hours worked,
and tax rates and produce outputs of pay slips and checks, using electronic
computer processes. The objective may be to produce accurate and timely
payrolls and reports.

A navigating system has inputs of position desired and present position
and produces outputs of desired courses, leading to later positions.

When defining a system in this manner, it is often very useful to simplify
thinking about it by asking: What are the objectives? What are the outputs?
What are the inputs? What processes are used to transform the inputs into
outputs?

Another definition of a system, provided by Cohen, Fink, Gadon, and
Willits ( 1988) is: any set of mutually interdependent elements. Mutual in-
terdependence means that a change in any one element causes some cor-
responding change in the others. In turn, those changes will have an impact
back on the original changed element. An example of a simple physical

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