Business orgs and Re: Decentralization and the navy

[staffan@medialab.ericsson.se (Staffan Liljegren) (by way of VanessaStevens Colella)]

All,

I would like to extend this discussion to business organisations
as well. I saw an MIT demo (presented by Professor Tom Malone, Sloane)
of an audience - that acted as decentralised pilotes - guiding a virtual
airplane through a target landscape . Each person in the audience could
guide either up-down or left-right and this was then fed into navigation
of the virtual airplane. The emergent behaviour - of course - was that the
virtual aircraft was safely guided through most of the  landscape. I liked
this analogy and it worked well as a popular demo of decentralised control.
But I started wondering if it would be feasible to gain something from
a StarLogo simulation.

As I have used StarLogo a little bit, mostly exploring projects from
MIT and the Connected Math team at Tufte under Uri Wilensky.This lead me to
ideas about doing the aircraft simulation in SL. But later I started to think
that it would be even more instructional to simulate a realistic situation
inside a company (similar to the ideas You outline below):

- flattened organizational structures that can adapt to a given mission,
- using distributed software agents to help manage info flows etc

The problem is of course to define what You want to show and how to quantify
important things like mission etc.

I realise that this is not a very interesting "phenomena" to study for
a PG-13 child, which is the target audience for SL, but I am still interested
in a deeper discussion in this area. I don't think there are any major
differences between e.g. Navy organisation and business org, so perhaps
we can keep it on a generic level that is usable to both. The difference
between
the military and business is that the latter is at constant war :-)

So what would be a good generic SL project to show benefits of
decentralised organisations ?

-Staffan Liljegren
 Research Manager
 Ericsson
| Gary,
|
| A couple of weeks ago I had a discussion with some teachers about
| centralization/decentralization. As an example of a system which
| is typically centralized is likely to remain so I suggested the
| organization of an army.
| After that, it was interesting and surprising for me to read that
| decentralization is a current research topic in the US navy.
|
| Would you like to share your insights about how decentralized organization
| structures would be applied in a military context? It is difficult to
| imagine how the army, which is in principle a very hierarchical,
| centralized organization, would make use of self-organization.
| How is the concept of decentralization accepted among the military people?
| Is there opposition to it, or support?
| My experience has been that many people (but not all) who have spent a
| lifetime working in a centralized, hierarchical organization are opposing
| the concept of decentralization, probably partly on an emotional basis.
| (Currently our education system is undergoing a change which puts much
| more emphasis on the teachers' own responsibility, thus making it more
| decentralized.)
|
| Gyorgy
|
| > I am considering use of StarLogo as the basis for exploring
| > decentralization and self organizing systems in a military context.  This
| > is a topical and important area of research in the Dept of Defense,  from
| > exploring flattened organizational structures that can change temporally
| > depending upon an organization's assigned mission, to using decentralized
| > software agents to help manage and update large integrated systems of
| > globally distributed systems.
|
|
|