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In an age in which consumers, businesses and governments are increasingly focused on socially responsible actions, much of our planet's natural and financial resources are being squandered simply by conducting business as usual: Much of the world's food supply never makes it to consumers. A considerable portion of the water used each year is frivoled away by poor agricultural water management. And road congestion, poor routing and other traffic issues around the globe contribute to substantial crude oil waste. Much - if not most - of this inefficiency can be attributed to the fact that we have optimized the way the world works within silos, with little regard for how the processes and systems that drive our planet interrelate. We've tuned these processes to generate specific outcomes for individual communities, nations, enterprises and value chains. To root out inefficiencies and reclaim a substantial portion of that which is lost, businesses, industries, governments and cities will need to think in terms of systems, or more accurately, a system of systems. We'll also need to collaborate at unprecedented levels. Certainly, no single organization owns the world's food system, and no single entity can fix the world's healthcare system. Success will depend upon understanding the full set of cause-and-effect relationships that link systems and using this knowledge to create greater synergy. The chief obstacle that remains is mindset - moving from short-sighted to long-term perspectives, from siloed to system-of-systems decision making. Download the IBM Institute for Business Value executive report, "The world's trillion-dollar challenge: Using a system-of-systems approach to build a smarter planet," to discover a framework for helping solve real-world problems using a system-of-systems approach.

daviding says: The use of the phrase "systems of systems" in a report from IBM Global Business Services (i.e. the management consulting arm) is interesting.

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.

Conference on Systems Engineering Research Stevens Institute of Technology and Delft University of Technology in collaboration with the University of Southern California (USC), presents the 8th Annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER) Conference Objective The objective of this conference is to provide practitioners and researchers in academia, industry, and government with a common platform to present, discuss and influence Systems Engineering research, and to enhance the practice of Systems Engineering and Systems Engineering education. Call for Papers We invite original research papers addressing any aspect of the Systems Engineering lifecycle. This includes conception, design and architecting, development, modeling and simulation, production, integration, validation, operation and support of these systems. Additional topics include definition of metrics, performance, and improvement methods, assessment and mitigation of risks, definition of critical success factors, and definition of best practices. All papers will be peer reviewed, and if accepted, presented at the conference.

daviding says: I have this conference marked on my calendar. The Nov. 1 paper deadline is tough for me. In addition, I should also be working on my dissertation in the spring ... and that's not on a systems engineering topic.

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

daviding says: This article published in the Rotman Magazine on "Wicked Problems" is available on the Ideo web site. Designing a system for scale is a practical and interesting challenge.

Growing Influential Networks Following are three approaches that specifically deal with the idea of humanizing big problems to influence people to change and grow influential networks. 1. Human-Centered Systems: Design for People, Not the System 2. Sticky Systems: Design for Scale 3. Reciprocal Systems: Connect by Sharing The Five Principles of Systems at Scale 1. Ask how the system feels, not just how it works. 2. Recognize that a good system is often the best influencer. 3. Let the user close the loop. 4. Go micro with the human factors. 5. Start with hope, and take the long view.

IBM (NYSE: IBM) and the University of Central Florida's (UCF) Institute for Advanced Systems Engineering (IASE) today announced they are working together to prepare students for jobs in systems engineering, a profession that is critical to the creation of the smart cities, healthcare systems and advanced products and systems of the future. To help create the systems engineering workforce that is needed to tackle society's most pressing technology development and integration challenges, IBM is investing more than $2 million in software, in-kind donations and consulting. Through this relationship, UCF students gain hands-on experience using IBM's most popular systems engineering software. In addition to its use in classroom activities, the IBM software gives students and faculty tools to compete for grants and participate in advanced research projects. IBM executives and technical staff provide input into the development of IASE curriculum and coursework, and support the university's efforts to create a learning environment that emulates the real world of systems engineering.

daviding says: The significance of the systems engineering program at the University of Central Florida (in Orlando) is noted not only by IBM, but by INCOSE (Samantha Brown, president) in this press release.

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 .

daviding says: I was struck by a quotation by Khistry in the first pargraph of this article. In fact, Churchman (1968) reveals toward the end of one of his most popular books: "Indeed, if I were to think of one theme that has been in the back of my mind as I wrote these chapters, it is the shame of deception" (p. 228). Churchman concludes: "The ultimate meaning of the systems approach, therefore, lies in the creation of a theory of deception and a fuller understanding of the ways in which the human being can be deceived about his world and in an interaction between these different viewpoints" (pp. 229-230).

This paper critically examines some important topics of systemic thinking to understand how our perception of problems can be enhanced and how the chances of deception can be mitigated while dealing with real-world problems. To achieve this objective, an attempt is first made to scrutinize some of the key issues of systemic thinking by looking through the lens of Churchman's aphorisms at: (1) the illusion of completeness and closure, (2) the meaning of holism, and (3) the concept of `Interbeing'. A preliminary `agenda for action' is then laid out suggesting ways for increasing our perception and for minimizing the chances of being deceived in dealing with systems problems in practice.

The Energy Systems Language (right), also referred to as Energese, Energy Circuit Language and Generic Systems Symbols, was developed by the ecologist Howard T. Odum and colleagues in the 1950s during studies of the tropical forests funded by the United States Atomic Energy Commission. They are used to compose energy flow diagrams in the field of systems ecology.

I was looking at the Systems Modeling Language page on Wikipedia, and noticed this link to Energy Systems Language, by Howard Odum. It's an interesting idea ... although it brings questions to the choice of modeling languages and approaches. No model is value-free.

The volume of auctions described at Google reflect a change made possible through advances in information technology. The only way that these auctions could be conducted is through the use of information technologies and establishment of business rules.

[....] Googlenomics actually comes in two flavors: macro and micro. The macroeconomic side involves some of the company's seemingly altruistic behavior, which often baffles observers. Why does Google give away products like its browser, its apps, and the Android operating system for mobile phones? Anything that increases Internet use ultimately enriches Google, Varian says. And since using the Web without using Google is like dining at In-N-Out without ordering a hamburger, more eyeballs on the Web lead inexorably to more ad sales for Google. The microeconomics of Google is more complicated. Selling ads doesn't generate only profits; it also generates torrents of data about users' tastes and habits, data that Google then sifts and processes in order to predict future consumer behavior, find ways to improve its products, and sell more ads. This is the heart and soul of Googlenomics. It's a system of constant self-analysis: a data-fueled feedback loop that defines not only Google's future but the future of anyone who does business online. [....] Kamangar and Veach decided to price the slots on the side of the page by means of an auction. Not an eBay-style auction that unfolds over days or minutes as bids are raised or abandoned, but a huge marketplace of virtual auctions in which sealed bids are submitted in advance and winners are determined algorithmically in fractions of a second. Google hoped that millions of small and medium companies would take part in the market, so it was essential that the process be self-service. Advertisers bid on search terms, or keywords, but instead of bidding on the price per impression, they were bidding on a price they were willing to pay each time a user clicked on the ad. (The bid would be accompanied by a budget of how many clicks the advertiser was willing to pay for.) The new system was called AdWords Select, while the ads at the top of the page, with prices still set by humans, was renamed AdWords Premium.

daviding says: This is the first of three articles in the June 2007 issue of SPAR. As an alternative to coming from a western perspective -- not to say that there aren't differences from the Anglo-American approach in Europe! -- these three chapters would provide significant fodder for discussion on core concepts in systems theory.

This paper compares some key concepts from Buddhism with ideas from different traditions of systems thinking. There appear to be many similarities, suggesting that there is significant potential for dialogue and mutual learning. The similarities also indicate that it may be possible to develop a Buddhist systems methodology to help guide exploration and change within Buddhist organisations.

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

daviding says: This is an interesting example of decomplexification (in the vocabulary of Tim Allen). Instead of integrating health services into a centralized facilities (i.e. complexifying), having doctors distributed nearer to the homes of patients can reduce costs. The difference between the era of Marcus Welby MD and today is that the Internet enables easy electronic sharing of patient records ... if the physicians and patients are willing to allow that free flow of information.

The primary-care doctor is gaining new respect in Washington. Battles may be breaking out left and right over the various health-care bills emerging from Congress, but reformers on both sides agree that general practitioners should be given a central role in uniting the fragmented U.S. medical system. This vision has a name: the "patient-centered medical home." The "home" is the office of a primary-care doctor where patients would go for most of their medical needs. The general practitioner would oversee everything from flu shots to chronic disease management to weight loss, and coordinate care with nurses, pharmacists, and specialists. A 2004 study estimated that if every patient had such a home, the resulting efficiencies might reduce U.S. health-care costs by 5.6%, a savings of $67 billion a year. [...] advocates say the new concept is designed to help patients, not insurers. It's more like doctoring 1950s-style, when a Marcus Welby figure handled all the family's medical needs. This time it's juiced up with digital technology. It also represents a politically painless way to streamline a disorganized and wasteful system that chews up a crippling 18% of the U.S. gross domestic product. That burden is felt particularly by private industry, which covers 60% of the nation's insured. Since most businesses try to ferret out waste and disorganization in their own operations, the medical home is a concept they can embrace in good conscience. One of the biggest advocates is IBM (IBM), which shelled out $1.3 billion last year on health benefits for its U.S. employees and retirees, equal to one month of the company's net income. Dr. Paul H. Grundy, 57, who holds the unusual title of director of health-care transformation for IBM, is a medical-home evangelist who led the company to start the Patient-Centered Primary Care Collaborative, a coalition of some 500 large employers, insurers, consumer groups, and doctors. Part of his goal, he says, is to show that "emp

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.

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).

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.)

In a surprise verdict that stunned even the defendant, a justice of the peace has dismissed a slate of raw-milk-related charges against Ontario dairyman Michael Schmidt and simultaneously delivered a boon to Canada's food-rights movement. Mr. Schmidt supplies raw milk to a small network of people with ownership shares in his dairy cattle. He was facing 19 charges related to public health and milk marketing when, looking grim, he took his seat before Justice of the Peace Paul Kowarsky in a Newmarket courtroom yesterday morning. Throughout the three hours it took Mr. Kowarsky to read out his 40-page verdict, the outlook for Mr. Schmidt's cow-sharing operation flip-flopped from promising to doomed and back again. But Mr. Kowarsky ultimately acquitted the farmer, a rising star in the growing international farming and food-rights movement, on the basis that the unique structure of his operation does not violate Ontario's stringent milk-marketing laws. Nor does Mr. Schmidt's provision of unpasteurized milk (which is illegal to sell in Canada) to shareholders endanger public health, Mr. Kowarsky said. The judgment, the culmination of a legal battle that was launched in 2006 after a raid by the Ministry of Natural Resources on Mr. Schmidt's farm in Durham, Ont., does not mean raw milk can be commercially sold in Ontario. The decision also remains open to appeal. However, it gives a boost to the burgeoning sector of creative farm-to-consumer food delivery-programs, including "cow-shares," which have grown in popularity as mistrust in the industrial food system has increased. "What I did foremost was make sure that farmers have the rights to engage in private contracting with consumers who make an informed choice," said Mr. Schmidt, who called the ruling "brilliant" but admitted he "didn't expect such a clear verdict." He has battled with public health officials and government milk regulators since the first crackdown on his raw-milk operation, in 1994. Unpasteurized pro

daviding says: The difference between selling milk and contracting for cow-share memberships can be seen as a shift from the presumptions of industrial production towards a service system. The regulators are trying to protect bulk distribution of raw milk from anonymous sellers to anonymous buyers. In Michael Schmidt's milk house, the cow-share owners not the provider of the product not only as the person who owns the farm, but also the original producer (i.e. the cow).

The original pointer to this report summary is from Jim Spohrer at http://forums.thesrii.org/srii/blog/article?blog.id=main_blog&message.id=191#M191 .

Key messages * There are three primary stakeholder groups that can guide the development of services science: academia, government and industry. Only by investing and working together in a coordinated manner can the maximum promise of services science be realised. * The global recession should sharpen government and industry's focus on services science as they seek solutions to invigorate the western economy, to make business more competitive and to learn from this latest setback. * Services science has the potential to establish a new industry of professionals (compare engineers, lawyers and computer scientists) whose expertise can be drawn upon to benefit the broader services-led economy. * The degree of human intervention required during the lifetime of an IT services contract is too high and is consequently both too expensive to be efficient and too error-prone to be effective. These shortcomings are directly related to the absence of scientific rigour in the design and delivery of these services. * IT is integral to services science, since modern service systems often have IT enablement heavily involved in service delivery. * IT service providers have the potential to benefit from services science by making their offerings more meaningful and resilient in a market that will increasingly demand more efficient service delivery. * Innovation in services delivery is at the heart of the vision for services science. The end goal should be a virtuous circle of innovation that can encourage new business opportunities and, in turn, create further innovation in the delivery of services. * Collaboration, investment and sharing of knowledge are vital to progressing services science research and development. * Significant challenges still need to be overcome to drive adoption of services science, not least of which is the complexity of aligning academic, business and governmental interests at a given moment in time. * Gove

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.

daviding says: If software engineering is engineering, then we should also think about service engineering as engineering. This article also helps to draw some lines between engineering as applied science, and more theoretical forms of science, both in the domain of services systems and human systems.

Gerald Weinberg once wrote, "If software engineering truly is engineering, then it ought to be able to learn from the evolution of other engineering disciplines." Robert Glass and his colleagues provocatively evaluated how often software engineering literature does this.4 They concluded that the literature relies heavily on software anecdotes and draws very lightly from other engineering fields. Walter Tichy found that fewer than 50% of the published software engineering papers tested their hypotheses, compared to 90% in most other fields. So software engineering may suffer from our habit of paying too little attention to how other engineers do engineering. In a recent extensive study of practices engineers expect explicitly or tacitly, Riehle found six we do not do well. Predictable outcomes (principle of least surprise). [....] Design metrics, including design to tolerances. [....] Failure tolerance. [....] Separation of design from implementation. [....] Reconciliation of conflicting forces and constraints. [....] Adapting to changing environments. [....]