Managing Information in Complex Organizations

Semiotics and Signals, Complexity and Chaos

Kevin C. Desouza, Tobin Hensgen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780765613608
• eBook ISBN: 9781317465522
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery
• Index: Business

This seminal work presents an effective design for processing information through five stages from data to actionable knowledge in order to influence behavior within organizations. The authors incorporate such concepts as evolution, semiotics, entropy, complexity, emergence, crisis, and chaos theory in an intriguing alternative to crisis management that can be applied to any organization. Their model shows how to evaluate and share information to enable the organization to avoid disaster rather than simply respond to it. Additionally, the text presents the first attempt at a multi-disciplinary view of information processing in organizations by tying associated disciplines to their respective impacts on the information process. Illustrations used in the text include an overlay that demonstrates how the non-use of information between agencies contributed to the 9/11 disaster, and an appendix addresses Organizing for Cyberterrorism.

1

Introduction

The dynamics related to today’s informational environments are far more complicated than those of fifty years ago. To a large extent, technology that provides “real time” or instant access to information greatly contributes to this complexity. More important, human reaction and the ability to process new information compound these conditions of complexity. Paradoxically, the causes for dilemmas in how information is handled also provide the solutions to resolve problem issues. First, however, we must understand the relation of information and data to information systems. This text provides a step approach intended to attain such an understanding. Each chapter will attack a discrete aspect of information handling, and the lessons learned will serve as a foundation for subsequent chapters.

Information failures bind commonalities in the events surrounding both World Trade Center attacks (1993, 2001), the fiascos involving Enron, Tyco, and Arthur Andersen, the crises and disasters of the Challenger, Chernobyl, Union Carbide (Bhopal), the Moscow Opera hostage situation, Waco, the Concorde, Exxon Valdez, and any number of other events that have commonly been lumped together under the category of disaster resulting from crisis. In each instance, information existed that might have assisted in lessening and possibly evading the impending crisis. In contrast, and possibly more important, examples exist that underscore success when information is handled properly. This book is about information and organizations. Specifically, the notion of how information affects and defines an organization is explored. One recent event involves the 2003 incursion of Coalition forces into Iraq. The military campaign provided evidence that information properly handled can produce successful results.

During the incursion of Coalition forces into Iraq in 2003, for example, we witnessed how information served to positively influence an organization and its mission. Before the conflict was begun, Allied information resources so outweighed that of the Iraqis that the outcome of the engagement was an almost certain foregone conclusion. A little later in the book we refer to temporal information processes upon which an organization may depend because these represent an archive of best practices and experiences “known” to the organization when faced with new challenges; these represent organizational memory. As a result of effectively drawing from the wealth of information contained within the organizations’ temporal archives, casualties and damage were kept to a minimum while nearly all goals and objectives were efficiently achieved.

However, once the major military phase of the campaign had concluded, so too did the type and source of information that might prove of value to an “occupying” army. Attention shifted from archives that provided uncertain or dated information with reference to the new tasks; the focus was now on spatial information, represented by the reception of new information from a variety of sources, many of which are uncertain. By November, intelligence resources and processes showed signs of rapid constriction, which resulted in poor information gathering, questionable processing, and a less confident information distribution mechanism. This in turn led to more casualties and more material damage to the Coalition’s resources than had been experienced during the phase of major combat. During the initial phases of the campaign in Iraq, intelligence was focused on a single objective. Once that objective was accomplished, not only were there more objectives, some of which had been expected, but there was also a need for many more sources of information, which may not have been anticipated. This condition, despite other resources, produces an untenable position for an offensive military machine that is suddenly required to assume the role of peacekeeper in an unpredictable environment.

These two extremes underscore a critical point this book will make, that is, information and organizations are inextricably related. The survival and growth of organizations is tied directly to information processing capacities and capabilities. But before we begin examining nuances that bind information and organizations, we must first address the concept of contemporary information use.

The term “information” is often overused and consequently becomes diluted. Phrases such as “information economy,” “information systems,” “information society,” and “information management” are used in a myriad of applications.¹ As a concept, “information” tends to serve as rhetoric rather than as an analytical or insightful function.² For practitioners and scholars the term becomes the proverbial conundrum inside a puzzle surrounded by a riddle, and meaning itself becomes entirely lost in the realm of etymology, that is, the history of words. This condition distorts both the representation and the reality of meaning to the extent that relations between a word and its meaning frequently become disparate. This forces limits in language and has a corresponding impact that limits thought.³ In a world where almost everything is immediately regarded as information, the word itself loses value. Without value, the motivation for purposeful research is severely restricted. In a sense, this notion revisits Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” in which public pastures were opened to all and the motive for conservation was lost. The remaining motive of self-interest resulted in overgrazing to such an extent that the saturated resource is lost to everyone.⁴

One point we wish to address in this context is the issue of “neutrality” as it exists between information and knowledge. Because data and information must be synthesized in the effort to achieve knowledge, both data and information must be regarded as neutral and unbiased. Knowledge on the other hand is rarely neutral. Without this distinction, information alone may become the basis for acting reactively and prematurely. The news media, for example, often presents information-as-knowledge, and organizations continually struggle with myth-information generated from rumor-central, that “invisible” group within organizations often found around company water-coolers that perpetuates gossip. While the politically correct phrase “We support the troops but not the war” was bantered along the Beltway, much of the popular press depicted the U.S. involvement in Iraq as a precursor to another Vietnam. While not particularly creative, this type of editorialized “information” violates the rule of neutrality in information and is akin to propaganda.

Similarly, during 2003 the media broadcast the notion that a condition known as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), which originated in China, home of the Hong Kong flu, represented a global threat rivaled only by the “black death” plague of the Middle Ages. Despite the fact that there was no statistical information to bolster this “information,” the city of Toronto was figuratively “quarantined,” and students were being held out of school because their teachers had recently returned from the People’s Republic. If one were to use the same faulty logic that applied to the popular “troops-to-war” comparison about Iraq, one might, based on the SARS misinformation, state that they “support the disease but not the virus.”

Organizations are complex generators and dissipaters of information. This is central to issues involving the attainment of organizational goals and survival. The generation of information involves creating information and knowledge for an organization, and dissipation is the process of modifying the organization through use of information.⁵ Effective and efficient generation and dissipation of information is a proven key determinant for competitive advantages. Organizations will generate and collect information about their constituent parts and process it in a number of ways. Behavior within an organization will be modified by the effects of information. But if information is mishandled by the organization, its potential value will be lost.

Information systems scholars have emphasized a need to make the role of information more visible in order to enable information sharing so that information can be leveraged, created, or expanded. This requires the construction of novel frameworks and systems if we are to understand the information processing function and understand the role played by information overload.

The main focus of this book is to present a diligent investigation into the role and concept of information and to map a more effective model for the use of information. This map will include management techniques involving the notions and practices associated with such topics as emergence, values-based leadership, and complexity. These concepts are being addressed individually in the literature, but this is the first attempt to bring them together in a purposeful, cybernetic approach. Cybernetics is derived from the Greek word kybernetes, which means “steersman” or “the art of steering” and refers to the idea of how things are interrelated. It is founded on the works of Wiener, von Bertalanffy, and Ashby, who, in the 1940s–1950s, developed theories to investigate communication systems that involved the transfer of information between systems and the environment, within systems, and the role of control or internal or external feedback in modifying its function.⁶ The topic represents an excellent start for many of the ideas put forth in this text and underpins our central assertion that information in various stages, that is, generation, movement, and dissipation, govern organizational actions and in turn performance.

This book will explore the intricacies of information processing rather than the more common “black box” approach. The text will serve to expand the boundaries of information sciences and be useful to practitioners and advanced students in a variety of related courses and fields. Entropy, the state of disorder, or uncertainty, within a system that ultimately maximizes and from which there is no return, while founded in physics as the second law of thermodynamics, is equally applicable to other disciplines when the principle is applied to information. This is a strong concept for an IT professional, but it carries the same impact for second-year biology students, philosophers, military personnel, or public sector practitioners. Traditional approaches to information are bound by inflexible theories. Our approach requires the user to develop new theories as the facts change.

Navigating This Book

The first section of this text establishes the preliminaries. Chapter 2 introduces some of the key terms we use through out the text—semantics, cybernetics, entropy, and signals. In chapter 3 we will discuss information forms and dependencies. Specifically, we begin to explore the many forms information can take and how dependencies in the organization are affected because of information forms. It is here that we introduce the three dimensions of information processing—evolutionary, spatial, and temporal.

The second section of the text explores these three dimensions of information processing further in terms related to organizational memory, how unreliable information may be detected, and steps required to move organizational information to organizational knowledge. Chapter 4 grounds the concept of “information” using the sciences of semiotics (signs) and the concept of emergence. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), the scientist and logician, established semiotics to represent information flow from data capture through to some actionable event, for example, decision-making. The use of the semiotic discourse is relevant here, as information is nothing more than a collection of signs which, if interpreted correctly, produce value for the organization. Specifically, we explain information flow using a semiotic model. Information is no more than a collection of signals organized in a logical fashion. Building on our semiotic model in chapter 5, we cover concepts of coupling and cohesion in the organization’s “information space.” Here we conduct a discussion of problems on organization faces when trying to comprehend, generate, and act on signals. We look at the role various organizational devices and agents play in the generation and dissipation of signals. The work here draws from the theories in electrical, communication, and systems engineering. It is our contention that over the past two decades society has made great advances related to signal processing and communication systems in the field of engineering science and as a result, at least on the technical side, we have been able to do more with less. Broadband, wireless, and remote computing advances have all furthered the science of signal transfer and recognition. But as organizations have attempted to embrace these technologies, they seemed to become worse at implementing them. This failure is related to techniques that are shortsighted. In chapter 6 we discuss alternatives to correct this problem that include challenges to organizational learning and the effects of emergent information, a topic of recent interest among information theorists, on organizational hierarchies.

The third section, covered in chapters 7 and 8, presents some of the traditional problems associated with crisis planning and how they tie in with misconceptions involving information processing. Given that all crises are predicated on warning signals, it is surprising how much of the literature deals exclusively on crisis containment and recovery after the fact rather than on the development of programs dedicated to crisis evasion. We contend that the information processing frameworks put forth in the first half of the book will help move thinking from crisis containment to the practice of crisis evasion. We look at how organizations can hurdle many of the traditional information processing barriers associated with the human side of information technology—cognitive dissonance, errors, illusion information processing, and information bottlenecks.

In the final section of the book we present steps that organizations can take to optimize their information processing activities. In chapter 9 we outline steps on organization needs to take in order to establish an adequate information architecture. In the concluding chapter we conduct a discussion on advances in science related to computing and on how organizations can benefit from our recommendations as they continue to process information.

The appendix provides case studies as illustrations of how optimal information processing could prevent disastrous conditions or evade the effects of crises. Additionally, we investigate crisis implications associated with the cyberworld, a largely neglected topic. This discussion examines the meaning of cyberterrorism, the forms it may take and how it can occur, and safeguards, using a semiotic model, that should be considered. A similar discussion is conducted to elaborate on the issues related to medical errors and how they might be obviated. Medical errors, for example, result in malpractice litigation and patient deaths, and are a common source for negative press in the health care industry. We show how the various types of medical errors can be mapped on a semiotic framework.

This provides the introduction on our...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Organizations of Information: Semantics, Cybernetics, Entropy, and Signals
• 3. Information Forms and Dependence
• 4. Evolutionary Dimension of Information Processing: Semiotics
• 5. Spatial Dimension of Information Processing: Coupling, Cohesion, and Chaos
• 6. Temporal Dimension of Information Processing: Emergence
• 7. Information Processing, Complexity, and Crises
• 8. Barriers to Optimal Information Processing
• 9. Setting Up the Organization for Optimal Information Processing
• 10. Recap and Real Time
• 11. The Future of Information Processing
• Epilogue
• Appendix A Cyberterrorism and Medical Errors
• Appendix B Bibliography and Suggested Readings
• Notes
• Index
• About the Authors