John W. Sutherland

A prospective on macrocybernetic process management systems

Abstract In an editorial in the February 1996 issue of Technological Forecasting and Social Change Professor Linstone noted that “the rapid pace of technology has not been matched by the pace of human change.” Were we to drop our perspective a bit lower, a similarly troublesome imbalance within technology itself becomes apparent: the rapid rate of increase in the complexity of process-related technologies relative to the much slower rate of increase in the sophistication of process control systems. The conclusion at which most technological forecasts seem to arrive is that there will be a continuation—perhaps even an acceleration—of the trend toward more intricate and sweepingly extensive processes (production-related and otherwise). If so, there is the specter of a steadily increasing shortfall between requirements and capabilities, and hence the likelihood of even grander technological embarrassments. This article considers two ways in which this shortfall might be kept in check. Increases in the intricacy of processes can be met, and to a considerable extent are already being met, by exchanging conventional process control facilities for enhanced alternatives. Less certain is how expansions of project scope might best be accommodated. One possibility is to consider exchanging process control systems for broader-purview process management systems. Hence the focus in this article is on prospects for the development of macrocybernetic constructs.

Model-base structures to support adaptive planning in command/control systems

The basic rationale for an organization to constitute itself as a command/control system is to increase its potential for coping with particularly perilous, volatile and ill-constrained competitive environments. One characteristic common to such environments is the likelihood of confrontation by unanticipated or unplanned for situations. The emergence of such a situation might require adaptive planning, yet as things now stand, there is virtually nothing in the way of a consensus on the sorts of technical facilities that might help support adaptive planning. Prospects are explored for the development of two classes of model-base structures-categorical and template-driven-both of which are intended to allow command/control systems to significantly accelerate the performance of certain key planning-related activities. >

Prospects for logical (versus data) processing facilities as strategic decision aids

The prospects for the development of facilities that can assist decision authorities in making disciplined logical inferences in case where mathematical or statistical methods cannot be relied upon are considered. Such facilities would provide a technical basis for the most important management decisions, namely those of strategic importance, which are currently the least likely to benefit from any formal discipline. >

Intelligence-driven strategic planning and positioning

Abstract The welfare of organizations—commercial, public, or military—operating in highly competitive, volatile contexts is intimately tied to their ability to accurately forecast the threats to which they might be subjected. Given sufficient notice, they may then move to avert or preempt a threat or, lacking that, position themselves in such a way as to best weather it. As things now stand, however, there is no general agreement as to what a threat-based planning/positioning process might look like. One particularly promising approach would be to adopt procedures of the sort that the professional intelligence community has evolved to support threat-based strategic contingency planning in the modern military sector, particularly those grouped under the general heading of Indicator/Warning-Alert (IWA) operations. In these pages, we suggest how certain of these procedures might be both formalized and generalized.

Relational Model-base Structures Underpinnings for Decision-driven (vs Databasedependent) Management Support Systems

As things now stand, administrative systems are likely to see their design options as being restricted to one or another of the products now being produced and promoted under the Enterprise Resource Planning banner. This dominance is troublesome because ERP packages are not a universally appropriate technical choice. Rather, because of their dependency on relational database conventions, ERP-based management systems are not well fit, in either form or function, to answer for anything much beyond the relatively pedestrian problems that punctuate ordinary business firms. They cannot be expected to efficiently or fully accommodate the more demanding analytical and operational challenges confronting the extraordinarily large and complex enterprises that are increasingly characteristic of the contemporary commercial sector. Hence the primary purposes of these pages: To introduce relational model-base structures as an alternative to conventional relational database structures, and thereafter go on to show why/how it is that management systems resting on relational model-base structures should be able to provide administrative authorities with a higher order of technical support than relational database-dependent ERP constructs.

Prospects for the Employment of Directive Decision Devices in Financial Applications

Expert systems, decision support systems, and knowledge management systems, are computer-based constructs intended to somehow assist human users in making decisions. Directive decision devices, on the other hand, are a prospective class designed to function as entirely autonomous decision agents, and so are capable of displacing human decision-makers. The primary purpose of this paper is to explore the prospects transferring the responsibility for handling certain sorts of financial management applications from human functionaries to directive decision devices.

Integrative systems: assessing requirements and capabilities for intra- and inter-organizational contexts

Of the several major functions of management (planning, control, etc.), integration remains the least well-elaborated in terms of its technical implications. It has been dealt with primarily as an aspect of formal organization theory where, naturally enough, the focus is on integrative requirements, deficiencies, and remedies that are essentially structural or configurational in nature. In contrast, the emphasis in these pages is instrumental, focused mainly on the relationship between technical requirements and technical capabilities. This paper is divided into four parts. The first part works through a generalized conceptual framework that will hopefully provide some meaningful insights into the origin and nature of integrative requirements. In the second part is proposed a four-part taxonomy of technically significant integrative modes. In the third part, arguments about the apparent reach and limits of currently available integrative instruments are presented. The final part suggests some ways in which implications drawn from the technical perspective might perhaps usefully complement integrative inquiries undertaken by management and transaction theorists.

Disciplining qualitative decision exercises: Aspects of a transempirical protocol

In Part I of this paper [The Case for a Transempirical Protocol], an attempt was made to provide a rationale for the definition of a new decision platform in light of certain constraints on the mainstream Objectivist and Subjectivist positions that restrict their use for qualitative decision exercises. The various provisions of the Transempirical protocol were then introduced as potential remedies for the shortfall in contemporary decision technology. Key among these provisions were facilities that could assist decision authorities in the following analytical activities:

The case for reactive management systems: Elements of a real-time decision technology

The dominant referent in mainstream management theory is the reflective paradigm. It is argued that the increasing level of complexity in many organizational environments makes the reflective paradigm increasingly inappropriate as a managerial referent, and planning-based decision instrumentation increasingly tenuous as a source of technical support. As alternative premise for management systems, the reactive protocol, is defined and discussed.

Attacking indeterminacy: The case for the hypothetico-deductive method and consensus statistics

Indeterminacy becomes intelligible in terms of an event-probability distribution where there is no predefinable event alternative which can be assigned any significant probability of occurence—or where the array of significantly probable alternatives is simply too large to be manageable within traditional analytical boundaries. In simplest terms, this suggests that the real future state will be some as yet undefined event, or some alternative for which we have not been able to prepare a contingency response. When faced with indeterminacy, the traditional response has been to drop the mantle of science and turn back to the realm of rhetoric or, more seriously, to cease the attempt to understand society and simply inaugurate an effort to change it. At any rate, it is at the point of phenomenal indeterminacy that the interests of the long-range forecaster and systems analyst intersect. For both, the distant future and the inherently complex, protean and equifinal systemshare the property of indeterminacy, and neither the long-range forecaster nor the complex-systems analyst is able to rely entirely on statistical extrapolation or, indeed, on any of the instruments derived from inductive (ampliative) inference. Instead, the approach of both begins to take on a deducive flavor, with the scientific aspect of the effort maintained largely through the offices of our ability to employ subjective probabilities in much the same way that the inductivist employs objective probabilities. Here, then, we want to explore some of the operational implications of subjective probabilities within the domain of phenomenal indeterminacy, and the role of deductive instruments within the arsenal of the long-range forecaster and complex-systems analyst.