Implications of This Model | Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture


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	Requirements Analysis: From Business Views to Architecture By David C. Hay
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	Chapter 5. Column Four: People and Organizations

Implications of This Model

Mr. Beer's model provides considerable food for thought about how companies really work. In particular, there are two implications: First, it correctly characterizes the number-one problem for a business as information overload; second, it provides insights as to how we should look at our own jobs.

Information Overload

How do I manage a multibillion-dollar company in a world where the business environment changes almost daily? And the problem isn't even that there is insufficient information about what is going on. It is that there is too much information. Not only is there too much information about what is going on within our organizations, there is way, way too much information about what is going on in the environment.

Variety has always been what management has been about, and it has grown much worse in modern times. To say that we are suffering from "future shock " is to say that the variety of our environment has exploded.

What this means for systems designers is that our number-one job is to create the amplifiers and filters necessary to enable a manager to survive. For filters, we must design reports that provide enough information, richly enough, to be useful in managing the enterprise, without providing so much that the important items cannot easily be identified.

Vice presidents , for example, are not going to go through a two-inch-thick report to find the four pieces of information they need. On the other hand, in 2001, a two-page summary of Enron's financial status clearly wasn't adequate to understand what was wrong at that company.

For amplifiers, we must set up structures such that a single command from above can easily be translated into a complex set of instructions to all involved.

Moreover, as we design these systems, we must understand which system we are serving: Systems One, System Two, System Three, System Four, or System Five.

And what does this model tell us about the movement toward knowledge management?

Knowledge is the application of information to useful ends. That is, knowledge is the variety that has been filtered to equal the variety of the manager perceiving it.

The meaning of knowledge management, then, is twofold:

First, the ability to absorb variety is now the most important trait anyone brings to the job of being manager. This capacity for dealing with variety is a direct function of intelligence and education. To deal with all that is going on around the enterprise, managers simply have to work smarter than they ever did in the past.

Second, to the extent that the world still will always have more variety than the manager can absorb, information systems are required that digest the information and produce the specific sets of information that allow for ready interpretation. To the extent that our information systems simply add to the noise, they provide no value to the enterprise.

To the extent that they provide exactly what is needed, they are indispensable .

Jobs

Traditionally, enterprise organization has emphasized the relationships between Systems Three and One. Systems Two and Four, if they existed at all, were diffused throughout the enterprise.

The cybernetic systems tended to look like this.

The CEO usually played System Five.
Middle Management mostly performed System Three functions.
Research and development, market research, and random, clever, pushy people were System Four.
Interdisciplinary Committees formed System Two.
And of course the workers were System One.

Now, however, technology permits much more interaction among all the players. The management role at System Three doesn't disappear, but many more people can participate in it, as well as Systems Two and Four.

Now you get something like the following configuration, in terms of the four twenty-first century jobs described previously (see page 209):

The CEO is still System Five.
Resource managers (inventory control, human resources, finance, etc.) are System Two.
Each effort is often independent of others, so project leaders play the role of System Three.
And it's the talentscientists, technicians, programmers and analysts, and othersthat are both Systems One and Four.

Our Personal Lives

In addition to the issues of variety that are present in managing organizations, similar issues are present as we manage our personal lives. Each one of us (forget about the enterprise for a moment) must suddenly deal with innovation, changes in technology, and a vast amount of new things that must be learnedthis week.

But we all have a limited "channel capacity", and we each deal with this fact in our own way. We select which magazines we don't read and, of those we do, which articles (or paragraphs) in them we don't pay attention to. We carefully don't hear discussions about subjects that are troubling or that might challenge our preconceptions. Similarly, we amplify our knowledge in the way we use those tidbits in conversation to give the impression that we know more than we do. ^[12]

^[12] Yes, we all do that, admit it.

As individuals, we destroy the variety we experience as well, and we amplify the variety at our disposal.

The assignment is to somehow organize our lives so that the gleaning of tidbits is systematic and at least leaves us aware of the things we are supposed to know, even if we don't quite know them yet. We also try to broaden our education as a way to increase channel capacity.

Of course we go to conferences and seminars and the occasional class to try to improve at least our intellectual tools for dealing with variety, if not our knowledge directly.

And we don't always succeed. There are religious wars about the best data modeling techniques to use, because none of us command enough variety to comprehend the full array of techniques that are out there and the implications of each.

Perhaps understanding this model will allow us all to accept our limitations and get on with our lives.


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