Most governments and organizations are complex and wasteful. They are complex because they increase their complexity in response to internal and external demands. They are wasteful because once they have added more complex functionality to their structure, they seem to be unable to refine and simplify the emergent new system. Mr. W. Brian Arthur described this encumbering phenomenon in his essay Why Do Things Become More Complex in the May 1993 "Scientific American".
Some of this failure to simplify is due to an inability to simplify, and some is due to an unwillingness to simplify. Either way, what results is an encumbered system that grows and grows, until subsystems or the system fails; a classic case of a positive feedback loop. Note here the similarity between the words "encumbered" and "incumbent".
Mr. Arthur also states "...even when a system gets lumbered down with complications, there is hope. Sooner or later a new simplifying conception is discovered that cuts at the root idea behind the old system and replaces it."
Much money is expended on information technology, with the intent of improving overly complicated and encumbered activities, but what we usually end up doing is creating a system to automate the existing complexity, rather than simplifying the activities.
When we look at an organization as a system, it is a human/machine system, having both human and machine components, an ergonomic system. The discipline of ergonomics deals with a human characteristic, a machine, and the interface between them. What we seem to be doing is designing the machine, then designing the interface, and then trying to match the human characteristic (information) to the interface, which is totally backwards. This can be seen when we build information systems (an interface) to apply information technology (a machine), before we have even attempted to bring order to our information (a human characteristic).
Why don't governments and large organizations deal with simplifying the complicated informing-issues? Perhaps it's easier and less messy to buy more and more tangible material things like computers, software, and telecommunications circuits, allowing us to keep our complexity in place, than to deal with flowing intangibles like human information.
With technology we can speed up our complexity. By keeping the complexity in place, we also keep the structure that supports the complexity. Since we can manage complexity faster, it can grow even more before it reaches its limits of effectiveness. This benefits those who are rewarded for managing complexity.
We then end up with large, complex, expensive hierarchical organizations producing industrialized, hopefully consistent products, which create a baseline measure of the standard of living. However, these organizations are usually unable to attain comparable production levels for innovative or customized goods or services that several simple, interconnected, dynamic, and less expensive work-units can achieve working under high standards of performance and competition, focusing on the flow of customers' changing requirements. They cannot match this innovation or customization because they block interconnection, dynamism, and simplification within the enterprise, which could perhaps undermine their complexity, and thus the justification for their structure.
The "simplifying conception" needed to improve governments and large organizations is that they bring order and consistency to their information, rather than investing in more misapplied information technology, more organizations, and more hierarchical layers, and that they provide everyone ready access to the informing-system. Borrowing from the last presidential election, the catchphrase would be: "It's the information, stupid"!
With well managed information, the organizations can adapt, respond, and flow with their changing environment and customer demand. With poorly managed information, they are just big, lumbering complexities, that will eventually fail and be replaced or fragmented, because they will grow beyond the limits of their "informing-system".
The way to continuously increase organization is to continuously alternate between adding complexity to an informing-system, and then simplifying that informing-system. Put another way, the enterprise must allow creative, adaptive, immediate expression of its member(s) in responding to the environment and demands, and then standardize and formalize the successful new solutions so that the entire enterprise can benefit from them.
Would an army survive if it chose to discount and block the information provided by its scouts, intelligence sources, or internal support? Can an enterprise survive if it hinders and discounts the free flow of information and ideas between and from the majority of its intelligence, which resides in the individual members? Can an end-user informing-system be effective if it is designed from the top and disregards its users' informational needs? If an individual person were responding in these ways to their nervous-system, senses and thoughts, they'd be considered mentally or physically impaired.
Many leaders, managers, and technologists don't seem to get it. Information is part of a larger human context, has order and consistency, can be managed and accounted for, and can be created, maintained, stored, processed, and distributed like any other resource. It is the only real resource of significance to humans and the only real source of power. Perhaps people want to cubbyhole and control information because they want to possess the power it engenders.
All other resources are controlled directly or indirectly by information. The difference is that information is primarily an intangible and flowing resource, rather than a tangible and static resource. It is more mental than physical. And most importantly, it is a resource that grows with its use. The more direct and indirect connection you can make between bits of information, the more powerful the resultant information. You can interchange information, meaning that both the supplier and customer have possession of it after the transaction. However, in a material transaction, you can only exchange material resources, meaning that the supplier gives-up possession of a material resource and the customer receives possession, in exchange or interchange for another resource. Material resources diminish with use. Both forms of communication, interchange and exchange, are necessary for health within an enterprise.
Every human within an enterprise has basic informational requirements that can be satisfied with a consistent across-the-board application of informing technology, made as ubiquitous as pencils, paper, telephones, desks, or chairs. Those basic informational requirements are to hear and be heard, see and be seen, and to receive, record, store, recall, process, and present appropriate information, whether locally or over a distance, and to know where they and their work fit within the enterprise as a whole.
When each person must separately and uniquely justify their own basic informational requirements, then tremendous inefficiency results, because each request will yield a different solution, because no two individual requests will ever be the same. By providing everyone with consistent basic informing tools, the complexity and cost of managing all these variations of technology can be diminished. With this baseline capability in place, emphasis can be placed on responding to innovative or customized needs. Then the efforts of bringing order to information can begin in earnest, especially if managers are rewarded for simplifying, rather than for internally generating more complexity.
Our enterprises are not mapping out the patterns of order and consistency inherent in human information. We're running wildly about throwing money and technology at the flood of information, trying to capture and channelize its dynamic flow. As a result, our current "information" has all of the characteristics of noisy torrent, carrying limited intelligence and overloading our ability to receive, process, and respond.
It's as though we are trying to individually account for all the variations on every leaf, on every branch, on every tree, in every forest, one leaf at a time. We're trying to do something from the bottom up, which can only be understood and acted upon from the top down. The variations in leaves can only be conceived of and understood from the higher perspective of seasons, weather systems, ecosystems, forest systems, tree species, and an individual tree's situation. There are just too many variations to individually track each leaf one at a time. But that's what we're trying to do with our enterprise information.
Another analogy would be that of a strategist who changes his long-term strategic direction by constantly responding to each bit of intelligence that come to him from the front line. Both are examples of chaos. The only way to grasp a situation fully is to step back a few levels of context and see the situation within its bigger picture.
The big picture for human enterprise is that there are only seven entities to be managed. Not a dozen, not hundreds, not thousands, just seven generalized entities. They are location, organization, work-unit, function, activity, resource, and requirement. Every other thing of interest to an enterprise is a category or component of these seven, including all tangible and intangible things.
Managing these seven generalized entities, the relationships between them, and their detailed attributes is what human enterprise, with its physical events and signals, and human understanding (data/ information/ knowledge/ insight/ awareness/ consciousness/ wisdom) are all about.
The basic human enterprise is a work-unit performing an activity guided by control-resources, using input-resources to produce output-resources by applying transforming mechanism-resources within a single locality.
The abstract entities of "organization" and "function" are where our enterprises tend to accumulate the greatest complexity and waste, and where the greatest savings and simplifications can be realized. The "organization" of work-units and "functional" separation of activities has nothing to do with producing the desired output of the enterprise, only with issues of hierarchical control. They only lead to duplication or fragmentation of work-units, activities, resources, and requirements within a single locality. With simplified organizational and functional control, the work units can be productive, with minimum redundancy within a locality, while providing their goods or services to their defined customers in a quality manner.
There are a variety of "Enterprise Models" in existence today. Most of these are specific to a single enterprise, and yet they are incomplete if they do not encompass the seven generalized entities identified above. When a specific enterprise takes the seven generalized entities and fits them into a limiting context by breaking them down into more fragmented and complicated pieces and/or omits them, they are only increasing the overhead of operating the enterprise, without adding benefit.
The best way our governments and large organizations can simplify without loosing productivity is by decreasing the complexity of their information and by providing every member with basic informing tools. They can do this by consistently pursuing methods of business process reengineering, enterprise engineering, and functional process improvement, with the immediate goal of resolving all enterprise information into the seven basic entities, their interdependent relationships, and their detailed attributes. Then they can ensure all of the intelligence of the enterprise is involved and informed by giving them ready appropriate access to the flow and store of information about the enterprise.
From this newly simplified state, they can then take measures to improve their culture, products, processes and structure, and evolve into future states unencumbered by the burdens of past complexity.
Roy E. Roebuck III
Fairfax, VA