Modeling of social systems In the 1988 article "Mechanisms, organisms and social systems" Gharajedaghi and
Ackoff argue, that there is a fundamental flaw in the traditional way to think about
social systems. They argued: To think about anything requires an image or concept of it, a model. To think about a thing as complex as a social system most people use a model of something similar, simpler and more familiar. Traditionally, two types of models have been used in efforts to acquire information, knowledge and understanding of social systems: mechanistic and organismic. But, in a world of accelerating change, increasing uncertainty and growing complexity, it is becoming apparent that these are inadequate as guides to decision and action. The growing number of social crises and dilemmas that we face should be clear evidence that something is fundamentally wrong with the way we think about social systems. In their paper they have tried to describe and explain the deficiencies of the two traditional ways of thinking about social systems. We then develop a third type of model, one we believe does not suffer from these inadequacies, a social system model which seeks to penetrate beyond the nature of machine and organisms to understand social systems in their own right.
Business architecture In the 1990s the
Information Age was unfolding changing the global market economy. With the businesses adapting, the new concept of business architecture was presented as promising alternative. Gharajedaghi (1999) explained the context: In a global market economy with ever-increasing levels of disturbance, a viable business can no longer be locked into a single form or function. Success comes from a self-renewing capability to spontaneously create structures and functions that fit the moment. In this context, proper functioning of self-reference would certainly prevent the vacillations and the random search for new products/markets that have, over the past years, destroyed so many businesses.In fact, the ability to continuously match the portfolio of internal competencies with the portfolio of emerging market opportunities is the foundation of the emerging concept of new business architecture ... According to Bodine and Hilty (2009) "important advances in this area borrowed from the operations discipline came in 1993 in the form of
Michael Hammer and
James Champy's book
Reengineering the Corporation, which introduced tools for mapping and optimizing business activities using process modeling. The
Balanced Scorecard developed by
Robert Kaplan and
David Norton at about the same time enabled the business to measure overall corporate success against goals on qualitative as well as quantitative dimensions." == Selected publications ==