It’s populated by people who talk a lot with one another as they work slowly but harmoniously on conservative, expensive projects whose destinations are decided in advance, and who carefully adjust their manner to reflect their position in the hierarchy.

When you study the course of affairs in an arbitrary enterprise as a naive observer, you notice that the persons in the enterprise seem busy like ants in executing a lot of different activities […]

Your first impression therefore invariably is one of a huge diversity and complexity, and of an apparent lack of structure and logic.

With these words Jan L. G. Dietz, the author of “Enterprise Ontology” describes how complexity of an organization can be interpreted. Analysis of systemic character of an organization provides us with information required for creation of convenient models such as organization charts, process diagrams and others that can be helpful in understanding the way the organization functions.

Speaking about the structure of an organization, its complexity level depends mainly on the size (or “capacity”) of the organization. Before the organization grows larger, manifold changes in its structure must occur for it to cope with the requirements of its environment (in this context I assume that the term “organization” denotes a company that is conscious of interactions with its environment).

The process of organization development becomes much easier to understand when we look at organizations through the lens of systems theory. An organization, a system in itself (System nature is going to be introduced in next part), succumbs to the process of division into subsystems.

A subsystem, as defined in “Enterprise Ontology”, is:

A system S2 is a subsystem of a system S1 if and only of the composition (1) of S2 is a subset of the composition of S1, the structure (2) of S2 is a subset of the structure of S1, and the environment of S2 is a subset of the union of the environment (3) of S1 and the set-theoretic difference of the composition of S1 and composition of S2.

Where:

1. means cardinality and classes (types) of elements in the system
2. means relations between elements of the system
3. means the environment of the system

Organization change

The diagram above shows the way subsystems are created and how their features are shaped. First part presents an organization in its primal state. Then changes in the composition of the system occur (the organization grows larger). The process of establishment of the subsystem shown in the third step can be easily observed when a new division of a company is created (I’ll pass an example another time). The environment of the new system is marked with gray.

What is curious, the process of subsystem formation is also described in the functionalist paradigm by Niklaus Luhmann who introduces it into social systems using the notion of “autopoiesis” (the quote comes from Wikipedia):

An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network. (Maturana, Varela, 1980, p. 7)

Certain truths about the nature of newly formed subsystem can be deduced from the above. Because of impossibility of proper long term management of a complex system, there exist a need to reduce the environment of the system in a particular way. New subsystem emerges that takes over some functions of the system part of which it constitutes.

Q.E.D.

End of Part One.

What we want to cover here are some of the most fashionable trends in management science, information technology and science in general, including modern theory of organizations, general systems theory, ontology based computing and others. Our goal is to understand them, their significance to each other and maybe to offer our own contribution.

Right now there is not too much content here (to say the least) but this is going to change rapidly. Soon we will write something about us and our background and some preliminary works we have already done in the field we want to write about.

All in all, we would like to welcome our prospective readers and encourage you to share your insights and to leave comments on posts and articles we are going to publish. And please, be civil when expressing your opinions :-)