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Patricia Stadel is administrative vice-president and director of information services at Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., a publisher of textbooks and software that had $150 million in sales in 1986. Stadel sees her job as management information systems (MIS) director as another step in her climb to a senior executive position, preferably at Addison-Wesley. Stadel says she always has been drawn to management tasks. When Stadel joined Addison-Wesley, the firm wanted to move away from a traditional, centralized approach to computing and create an end-user-oriented environment. While the MIS post represented a huge challenge, the Addison-Wesley environment offered Stadel the management opportunity she desired. In the year since Stadel joined the company, the firm's Bill Webster says she has made progress in creating a more businesslike management team in MIS. In structuring her group into a service organization, she is focusing on education and using information center concepts without information-specific hardware and software.