This volume presents a selection of the presentations from the annual conference of the Society of Cost Estimating and Analysis that was held in McLean, Virginia in the summer of 1992. The papers are representative of the issues that are of interest to researchers in the cost analysis community. Cost analysis is interdisciplinary. Its foundations are in the intersection of operations research, managerial accounting, systems analysis, and economics. These papers are representative of the diversity of our discipline. The topics included in this volume cover both public and private sector issues, and they range from manufacturing systems analysis to software engineering economics. In all cases, the emphasis is on modeling, understanding, and predicting the costs, benefits, and risks associated with alternative actions within organizations. This is a particularly challenging time for the cost analysis profession; hence the conference theme: Balancing Technology and Declining Budgets. With government budgets declining and the concurrent reengineering of public and private organizations, there is much demand for systems analysis. New methodologies are needed to model the productivity enhancing effects of investments in new technologies, while simultaneously quantifying the cost savings from implementing new business processes. These issues were addressed at our annual conference, and they will continue to be the important research topics at future conferences. We thank everyone who helped make this conference a success, especially those who graciously allowed us to include their work in this volume.