Group items tagged

Building on the success of the original INNOV8 in the academic community, INNOV8 v.2 will be available at no cost to businesses and academic institutions for simulations and training. The new version features puzzles and tasks that challenge players to tackle real-world challenges. INNOV8 v.2 delivers a complete redesign of the game, with a new global collaboration feature for players to work with virtual teammates to progress to the next level of the game. In addition, three new game scenarios reflect a new level of intelligence required for future, high-value job opportunities: * 'Green' Supply Chain: Players evaluate a traditional supply chain model and are tasked with reducing a fictional company's carbon footprint. * Efficient Traffic Flow: Players evaluate existing traffic patterns and re-route traffic based on sensors that alert the player to disruptions such as accidents and roadway congestion. * Call Center Customer Service: Using a call center environment, players develop more efficient ways to respond to customers. [....] Most MBA programs are already heavily based on projects that reflect how individuals and teams need to interact in the real world. INNOV8 v.2 takes that a step further by actually allowing students to step into a dynamic business environment. Based on advanced commercial gaming technologies, it allows players to visualize how technology and related business strategies affect an organization's performance. Together, players can map out business processes, identify bottlenecks and explore 'what if' scenarios in an experiential learning environment. [....] INNOV8 v.2 will be available in May 2009. For more information on INNOV8, IBM's Academic Initiative or to access the virtual press kit, pleas visit www.ibm.com/innov8.

daviding says: The main page is at http://www-01.ibm.com/software/solutions/soa/innov8/index.html . I haven't played the game -- I'm not a fan of video games -- so if you want to try 5 to 10 minutes online, I'd be interested in your experience.

daviding says: The web page has a link to a PDF, in which the footnote reads: "This paper is Chapter 1 of Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, by Jeff Conklin, Ph.D., Wiley, October 2005." If the challenge of a wicked problem wasn't enough, communicating a potential solution each new person coming to the problem creates its own issues. Dialogue mapping could provide some assistance in at least reducing the learning curve of the new participant on options, alternatives, paths and considerations already covered.

For a more detailed discussion of wicked problems, see Wicked Problems and Social Complexity, CogNexus Institute's most downloaded white paper. Problem wickedness demands tools and methods which create shared understanding and shared commitment. Following Horst Rittel's analysis, we have developed "Dialogue Mapping", based on Rittel's Issue Based Information System (IBIS), which provides an elegant way of dealing with the fragmentation around a wicked problem. Because the group or team's understanding of the wicked problem is evolving, productive movement toward a solution requires powerful mechanisms for getting everyone on the same page. There will be volumes facts, data, studies and reports about a wicked problem, but the shared commitment needed to create durable solution will not live in information or knowledge. Understanding a wicked problem is about collectively making sense of the situation and coming to shared understanding about who wants what. Dialogue Mapping is such a method, because it is an approach which is rooted in maximizing communication and coherence among diverse stakeholders. Dialogue Mapping -- the process of crafting IBIS maps interactively with a group -- is not a process in the traditional sense: it is a structural augmentation of group communication. It provides a group with an enriched Dialogue environment which both de-emphasizes personal dynamics (e.g. right/wrong or win/loose dynamics) and creates a coherent shared space for crafting and negotiating shared understanding.

The research presented in this volume, developed in the EC-funded Project ISCOM (Information Society as a Complex System), takes off from two fundamental premises: -- to guide innovation policies, taking account of the social, economic and geographic dimensions of innovation processes are at least as critical as the science and technology; and -- complex systems science is essential for understanding these dimensions. Online version (possibly available at http://www.springerlink.com/content/978-1-4020-9662-4 -- Table of contents -- 18 Chapters Front Matter I-IX Part 1 Introduction David Lane, Robert Maxfield, Dwight Read and Sander van der Leeuw 1-7 Part I From Biology to Society Front Matter 9-9 From Population to Organization Thinking David Lane, Robert Maxfield, Dwight Read and Sander van der Leeuw 11-42 The Innovation Innovation Dwight Read, David Lane and Sander van der Leeuw 43-84 The Long-Term Evolution of Social Organization Sander van der Leeuw, David Lane and Dwight Read 85-116 Biological Metaphors in Economics: Natural Selection and Competition Andrea Ginzburg 117-152 Innovation in the Context of Networks, Hierarchies, and Cohesion Douglas R. White 153-194 Part II Innovation and Urban Systems Front Matter 195-195 The Organization of Urban Systems Anne Bretagnolle, Denise Pumain and Cline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo 197-220 The Self Similarity of Human Social Organization and Dynamics in Cities Luis M.A. Bettencourt, Jose Lobo and Geoffrey B. West 221-236 Innovation Cycles and Urban Dynamics Denise Pumain, Fabien Paulus and Cline Vacchiani-Marcuzzo 237-260 Part III Innovation and Market Systems Front Matter 261-261 Building a New Market System: Effective Action, Redirection and Generative Relationships David Lane and Robert Maxfield 263-288 Incorporating a New Technology into Agent-Artifact Space: The Case of Control Syst

Print ISBN: 9780470382417 Online ISBN: 9780470569627 DOI: 10.1002/9780470569627 Industrial Engineering What you need to know to engineer the global service economy. As customers and service providers create new value through globally interconnected service enterprises, service engineers are finding new opportunities to innovate, design, and manage the service operations and processes of the new service-based economy. Introduction to Service Engineering provides the tools and information a service engineer needs to fulfill this critical new role. The book introduces engineers as well as students to the fundamentals of the theory and practice of service engineering, covering the characteristics of service enterprises, service design and operations, customer service and service quality, web-based services, and innovations in service systems.

daviding says: If the foundation of the system is in entropy rather than equilibrium, we'll need to figure out how exchange-based societies work, and the function of money (as information, in a general theory of systems).

The specific purpose of this paper is to trace the development of entropy-related thought from its thermodynamic origins through its organizational and economic applications to its relationship to money information. That trace reveals that existing entropy measures are of states or changes in states that are caused by energy processes. We propose that entropy may as well be conceived as entropic process. The social emergent specific exchange value provides a metric by which entropic process may be quantified. The analysis connects the traditional state-oriented entropy measures to measures of entropic process in social systems. In doing so, the character of exchange-based societies and the function of money information within them are elaborated.

Wayne Wymore is now well established as an important leader in systems engineering and a founder of a highly original "school of thought" in the area of systems design. His contribution to this area, which will be the subject of a special issue of this journal in the near future, is best exposed in a trilogy consisting of this book and its two predecessors [Wymore, 1967, 1976]. Wymore's approach to systems design is characterized by mathematical rigor, comprehensiveness, and broad applicability. This book is, in some sense; the most complete presentation of his approach, even though it is restricted (contrary to its predecessors) to discrete systems. [....]

daviding says: At the 2010 INCOSE Workshop on Autonomous System Testing and Evaluation, Jack Ring cited a "Wymorian approach", which is based on "A mathematical theory of systems engineering: the elements" by A. Wayne Wymore (see http://books.google.ca/books?id=yXrsAAAAIAAJ , unfortunately without a full preview). This may be at the foundations of the current interest in MBSE at INCOSE as a major initiative. The 1993 book is previewable at http://books.google.ca/books?id=CLgsYC3K2yAC .

I watched the first video, and it made the U.S. social security system (mismanagement) easy to understand. Note the references: Odum, Basteson, Jantsch.

Ecolanguage introduces a few new things: (1) the use of regular motion as a part of standard grammar, and (2) the use of a visual symmetry -- the hexagonal snowflake -- to stand for an organization of any kind, at any level of nature and society. In the center, we put the ruler. Everything else is based on things which came before. By using old and new things, Ecolanguage comprises: (A) an international systems language, (B) an accelerated learning strategy, (C) an integration of important and crucial topics, and (D) a scientific philosophy, emerging from many thinkers and writers over the last century, that brings the life, social, and cognitive sciences into the same picture as the physical sciences. We put the new basics of INFORMATION and ORGANIZATION alongside the established basics of MATTER and ENERGY. Now we can represent purposiveness, intention, relationship, agreement, and belief. We can locate the position of mathematical and physical deduction within a larger picture of communication and exchange. We can indicate both analysis and synthesis, including the redundancy of parts and their transcendence into wholes. It is a picture of our perceptual framework, no matter where we look. For a fun primer on this philosophy, please watch: New Chart, for Descartes. (For the old pointers, see the following bibliography.)

OMG™ and the International Council on Systems Engineering (INCOSE) today announced that they have agreed to work together on the development of OMG's new program to certify Systems Engineers and other practitioners on the OMG Systems Modeling Language (OMG SysML™) standard. SysML is a graphical modeling language used to perform Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) - that is, to specify and design complex systems that may include hardware, information, personnel, and facilities in addition to software. The program, to be called OCSMP™ (OMG-Certified Systems Modeling Professional), will be OMG's fourth certification. OMG, an international, open membership, not-for-profit industry consortium, maintains standards for interoperability, modeling, and process maturity including the Model Driven Architecture® (MDA®) and Unified Modeling Language™ (UML®); in addition, OMG certifies practitioners in many of these standards. INCOSE is a not-for-profit membership organization dedicated to advancing the state of the art and practice of systems engineering, in part through its Certified Systems Engineering Professional (CSEP) certification program.

The hard (in the sense of difficult) part of service science is the social system side. INCOSE and OMG don't really address that. They address the hard (as opposed to soft) systems aspects, with people merely as more parts of an intrinsically engineered system (weapons system, transportation system, etc.). I applaud your diligence with respect to SysML and all that, but I hope your vision of the science of service systems is big enough to include the social side as well.

daviding says: I was thinking about (output) coproduction and (value) cocreation, and came across these proceedings, which includes a short article by Rafael Ramirez and Ulf Mannervick on "Designing value-creating systems".

Essay Archive Edited by Lucy Kimbell and Victor P. Seidel, collected in this innovative and highly illustrated volume are findings from the designing for services project. Particular focus is on the practices of an emerging discipline of service design grounded in the arts and humanities. Three case studies in which service design companies worked with science and technology-based enterprises are discussed, from a range of academic perspectives.

At the UN -- actually the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe -- ther version 1 models and metamodels dated 2006 are published.

UMM User Guide (UMM in a nutshell) UMM Foundation Module V1.0 (2006) UMM Base Module V1.0 (2006) UMM User Guide UMM Metamodel - Revision 12 (2003) UMM Revision 10 (2001)

We introduce the concept of structural analysis of a business enterprise. The practice of enterprise structural analysis amounts to the construction of an enterprise model using business entities defined in an enterprise ontology or enterprise architecture and creating specific views of the enterprise based on relationships among the entities. As we demonstrate through a simple yet illustrative example of a hypothetical coffee shop business, these views can provide many insights and points of analysis. Structural analysis provides an interactive, analytical environment for a user to view an enterprise from multiple perspectives, an approach not unlike On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) but for analyzing the qualitative or structural aspects of the enterprise.

daviding says: This article describes business entities, and works concretely through an example with activities, resources and organization in a coffee shop.

The Royal Society has recently published the findings of a major study on the role of science in services sector innovation. Entitled Hidden Wealth: the contribution of science to service sector innovation , the report highlights the wider significance of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) to the services sector, which makes up around three quarters of the UK economy. Hidden Wealth concludes that STEM is deeply embedded within the UK service sectors and has an extensive impact on service innovation processes, which is often hidden. Although STEM is important in services sector innovation now, it is also likely to play an important part in the future of services, as many services are on the cusp of a transition to more personalised and interconnected systems, which will require significant advances in STEM.

This report from the Royal Society was cited by Irving Wladawsky-Berger at http://blog.irvingwb.com/blog/2009/08/hidden-wealth-science-technology-and-services-innovation-in-the-21st-century.html .

Excerpt: 6.6.6 A systems-based approach to understanding services. One solution may lie in the wider adoption of systems-based approaches to understanding services. A more systematic approach to studying services should result in better design, management and understanding of services and, at the same time, provide a suitable context in which to integrate disciplines such as social sciences, management science, economics and STEM. These sorts of educational programmes may particularly benefit firms who do not require graduates with deep knowledge in one of the existing disciplines. [p. 61] However, we note that when this has been attempted in the past, as with systems science and complexity theory -- both of which have existed for several decades and have been widely applied in scientific, engineering and social science contexts -- the tendency has been for people to organise themselves into disciplinary silos, with the result that the desired new interdisciplinary approaches have struggled to impose themselves. [pp. 61-62] The emerging Service Science, Manufacturing and Engineering (SSME) or 'Service Science' concept is also intended to join up a broad range of disciplines, but is specifically concerned with ensuring that graduates are better equipped for the workplace. Service Science may ultimately help the development of multi-disciplinary capabilities but in this regard SSME programmes seem to have been slow to emerge and only partially successful to date. A more profitable approach to redesigning academic curricula and delivery (at least as far as services are concerned) may be to focus in on service design, which seeks to understand the delivery of services from a user perspective and to develop better solutions (see Box 4.3 on page 40). Developments such as the Masters course in Service Design, Management and Innovation offered by the University of Manchester Centre for Service Research might provide good models for new courses, and should be closely mon

The basic idea: A method to select the appropriate management actions in a complex adaptive system based on the degree of certainty and level of agreement on the issue in question.

daviding says: I came to this 2001 page by Brenda Zimmerman, interpreting Ralph Stacey's work, via the presentation on the Constellation Model by Tonya Surman (at the Centre for Social Innovation, Toronto).

UMM is based in UML, which means it's about modeling the information aspects of businesses. This Wikipedia entry seems underdeveloped, so the description should taken with a grain of salt. It does point out that UMM attempts to decouple from implementation technologies such as Web Services and ebXML.

UN/CEFACT's Modeling Methodology, commonly known as UMM is a modeling methodology which is developed by UN/CEFACT - United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business. Goal of UMM The primary goal of UMM is to caputure business requirements of inter-organizational business processes. These requirements result in a platform independent UMM model. The UMM model can then be used to derive deployment artifacts for the IT systems of the participating business partners. UMM at a glance UMM enables to capture business knowledge independent of the underlying implementation technology, like Web Services or ebXML. The goal is to specify a global choreography of a business collaboration serving as an "agreement" between the participating partners in the respective collaboration. Each business partner derives in turn its local choreography, enabling the configuration of the business partner's system for the use within a service oriented architecture ( SOA).

daviding says: Although the title says "price", informal ties reduce the cost of client interactions because the effort to transfer information on complex issues is lower.

... they modeled three features: how firms' prices changed with respect to the number of embedded ties they had with clients; the number of the firm's attorneys who sat on the boards of other corporations; and the status of the firm as perceived by peers. The greater the proportion of informal relationships and unwritten arrangements a firm enjoyed with clients, the lower the fee the firm typically charged for complex legal work. Such ties promote clearer understanding of client needs and preferences and lessen the need for rigid oversight structures, allowing for more efficient and timely operation, thus requiring less billable time from a firm. Said one partner: "It's no question that trust enters into [pricing]. I mean, it's very rare that you're going to get the big $500 million transactions-I don't see them with a stranger." Said another: "A relationship allows [the client] to be more nimble with our firm; rather than having a formal engagement in a project, she may call a partner she knows directly-so it's very efficient for her." Besides promoting the flow of private, valuable information between firm and client, network ties can give the firm access to useful information flowing between other parties. In particular, a firm can benefit significantly if its attorneys sit on corporate boards. One attorney described two notable advantages of board membership this way: "You have the benefit of seeing what other law firms are charging if the company that you sit on is using other firms. . . . And you get the benefit of the commentary that your fellow board people have on legal services and what they consider to be important." As a result of this privileged information, firms whose partners sit on corporate boards are able to charge higher rates for both routine and complex legal work. Law firms perceived to have high social status are able to offer image-enhancing benefits to its clients, since the clients will appear knowledgeable