Making investment decisions at Columbia

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Louis:

This is a very high level view of a Decision Support System
database that I work on at Columbia University. I spend 2/3
of my time supporting it, and 1/3 on the Facilities Management
System I mentioned earlier.

***********           ***********
* General *-----------* Payroll *
* Ledger  *           *         *
***********           ***********
                           |
                           |
                      ***********
                      * Teacher *
                      *         *
                      ***********
                           |
                           |
***********           ***********
* Student/*-----------* Course  *
* Alumnus *           *         *
***********           ***********

On further reflection on Berkeley Rosser's question about investment
decisions, I realize now that the Decision Support System (DSS) at
Columbia is used exactly for that purpose even though it is not a
profit-making institution. The primary users are Deans and other
high-level financial officers who are responsible for preparing
budgets. Before this system was installed, it was extremely difficult to
answer the following sorts of questions:

1) How much does it cost to educate a student?

2) What is the revenue generated by different departments in
comparison with each other historically?

3) What is the relationship between alumni donations and their
majors, by country.

4) etc.

The answers to these sorts of questions will allow the university to
make decisions how to allocate revenue. Columbia just successfully
raised a huge amount of money from alumni with deep pockets. It has
jumped into 6th place of all universities in terms of the size of its
endowment.

It needs to make major decisions now about how to use this
endowment. It has to replace aging buildings and other physical
infrastructure. We are talking about hundreds of millions of dollars.
The DSS will be instrumental in allowing the top officers make
decisions about how to allocate capital.

This would be a daunting task without the DSS.

One of the reasons I am enthusiastic about the possibilites of
computers for socialist development is that I have seen their power
mobilized to aid capitalism over the years. Although I have been
working at Columbia, a non-profit, for the last 4 years, my previous
24 years in the business have been for the following sorts of
companies: Mobil Oil, New York Telephone, Goldman-Sachs,
Federated Department Stores. All of these enterprises are *heavily*
dependent on computers to compete. On Wall Street, there have been
instances of brokerages firms going under because they lacked the
computing power to process trades.

In a certain sense, the failure of socialism in the Soviet Union was
directly related to its technological backwardness. Gorbachev's
mission was to bring the USSR into the information age. He had a
luke-warm social democratic model in mind politically, which
ultimately doomed him, but he was quite lucid about the need for a
computer and communications revolution.



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