According to the termination of Cold War between USA and USSR, all the former structures of political, economic, social, and national systems are being examined both internationally and domestically. And the preparations of these new systems have begun. In order to cope with such world-wide structural revolution times of environment, executives and managers of Japanese companies have to change their philosophy of management and control, to change their systems and organizations, and to make clear the management information they require. These management information should be prepared systematically by the information systems, making use of advanced information technology.

Though an international mail survey, we asked the 400 Japanese IS professionals to identify what they perceived to be the most critical management issues for the next these to five years. Top ten issues were identified Contrary to our expectation, they were mostly managerial in nature We then compared the result with finding from similar US key-issue studies. On the paradigm-shifting revolutionary managerial issues Japan seems follow US by 5-6 years. On the issues dealing with core IS activities or new technologies, Japan and US do not seem to have a discernible time lag between them. Finally, a comparison was drawn between IS academics and IS practitioners on their perceptions of key issues. On eight of the twenty-five issues surveyed, perceptions of the two groups differed significantly, suggesting the need to bridge the gap between the IS academia and IS industry.

Computer system is indispensable for financial decision making. In this paper, I will describe the characteristics and likely future development of Decision Support System (DSS) for investment strategy. First, former feature of investment support system will be described and some its problems will be pointed out. Second, the concept of DSS is very important and its classification will be presented. Third, this concept of DSS is useful for asset allocation strategy that is considered to determine more than 90% of pension performance. Finally, likely future development of DSS for investment strategy will be described.

The expert system (ES) is conceivably an important method of system engineering for replacing the expert's and veteran's jobs in the company from the standpoint of our experiences associated its development. The ES development and its maintenance are likely to depend upon the knowledge engineers (KE) due to the intensive difficulties and high cost performance in comparison with common system development. Therefore its common use is not easy.

In order to solve these matters, it is necessary for us to construct the standardization methods for developing ES by utilizing the methodologies used commonly in system development, and also to promote it by the internal system engineers (SE).

There is an importance for developing ES in which three technical standards such as the standardized procedure of the development ranging from acquiring the expert's knowledge to incorporate these into the inference engine design, and the standards to develop inference engine and user interface are prepared.

And also the rule-moduling and its control model are newly introduced for the efficient process of producing the ES inference engine, and for the improvement of rule maintenance.

These standards have been successfully applied to the development of ES for supporting the scheduling work by the SE.