Posted by Yogesh Malhotra on January 08, 1998 at 18:15:41:

In Reply to: Re: Knowledge Ecology & Knowledge Management posted by Mezei on January 02, 1998 at 10:52:12:

Don,

You have raised a key point about 'systems managing themselves intelligently.' However, most of our organizational control and information systems are aimed to externally manage such systems. Often, such systems may result in myths of external controls... examples include the current debate about the use of rewards and punishments for 'managing' human behavior (cf: Alfie Kohn's book entitled Punished by Rewards).

On a related note, my quest into knowledge management started with a question that I had posed to Professor John Holland, the inventor of genetic algorithms. In response to my question on how organizations, with the help of information systems, can act as self-adaptive systems, he had responded:

"I think you have hit upon an area that has seen very little coordinated research. There has been an over-concentration on Shannon's definition of information in terms of uncertainty (a very good definition for the original purposes) with little attempt to understand how MEANING directs a message in a network. This, combined with a concentration on end-points (equilibria) rather than properties of the trajectory (move sequence) in games has lead to a very unsatisfactory treatment of the dynamics of organizations."

-- Yogesh

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Follow Ups:

• Re: Managing Systems that Can Self-Manage Themselves christine cabaņesas 22:31:19 7/10/98 (0)
• Re: Managing Systems that Can Self-Manage Themselves christine cabaņesas 22:30:31 7/10/98 (1)
  • Re: Managing Systems that Can Self-Manage Themselves Yogesh Malhotra 01:49:48 7/11/98 (0)
• Re: Managing Systems that Can Self-Manage Themselves Mezei 23:26:32 1/08/98 (0)

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