One minute Paper: The capacity to adapt behavior based on environment information.
Wouldn’t this amazing capacity the one who did allow humanity to survive and to evolve? What if information systems would have this capacity to adapt the information to the environment?
Would a system be able to think?
Those questions came to my mind while reading the Lectures 1 and 2 from Unit 1: Introduction to Information Systems & Systems Thinking (Dr Krebs, 2012/13, 2015, 2016).
A challenge faced for a successful and effective management of information is the capacity to implement the necessary organization changes. Dr David Kreps (2016) explains that information has a value because it can trigger decisions and events.
The writer reminds the begin of his career as a Sap Business Warehouse consultant. At that time the main motivation for the adoption of a data warehouse was the opportunity to “close the loop”. This concept is a feedback created by the actions which the decision maker took after analyzing the data provided by the data-warehouse. In a next loop, those actions would be visible in the transactional activity and analyzed in the data warehouse, in order to correct or emphasize the previous actions.
The principle of Feedback as explained by Dr Krebs (2012/13, 2015, 2016) allows systems to adapt the behavior based on the changes of information received from the observed environment. The example of the radar represents an attempt to imitate one the most amazing humans capacity: adapting to the environment.
The writer understanding of feedback related to a system is that feedback allows to go towards a system, self-control, independent from an external “regulation” but dependent on the “observed” environment. As for an example, a system in which a car would keep the distance from the preceding vehicle would work on the data provided by the onboard radar and would not consider the driver input.
A very interesting concept is Self-Organization and self regulation.
For a system is a Cybernetic concept which explains how a system can evolve toward equilibrium by adapting its organisation (Dr David Krebs, 2012/13, 2015, 2016) .
In theory self regulation could apply to any kind of system. As for example, introducing limits in the air pollution level in a city with heavy private vehicles traffic would force the city administration to stop the traffic in case of limits violations. People would have to use public transport. This could allow a kind of system “education”.
On the other hand, a self regulation could lead to a paradox, as the increase of the threshold levels defining a “pollution alert” whenever the levels could not be maintained under control.
In reality the behavior of a group of people is very complex. And as expressed by Dr Krebs the characteristics of the components can be completely different from the characteristics of the group.
Complexity for systems has a peculiar meaning: the single parts of the a system have properties and the entire system has other properties which may not be comparable with the single part properties. (Dr David Krebs, 2012/13, 2015, 2016)
References :
Introduction to Information Systems:
What is IS? , Dr David Krebs, 2016, University of Salford
Systems Thinking: a story by
Dr David KrepsDr David Krebs, University of Salford. Lecture initially developed in 2012/13, became Chapter 4 of “Bergson, Complexity and Creative Emergence” published August 2015. Revised in May 2016)
Alessandro Filippi 