unitFN1

Study Unit FN1 - Organisations and Systems

Copyright Notice: This material was written and published in Wales by Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer). It forms part of a multifile e-learning resource, and subject only to acknowledging Derek J. Smith's rights under international copyright law to be identified as author may be freely downloaded and printed off in single complete copies solely for the purposes of private study and/or review. Commercial exploitation rights are reserved. The remote hyperlinks have been selected for the academic appropriacy of their contents; they were free of offensive and litigious content when selected, and will be periodically checked to have remained so. Copyright © 2001-2003, Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer).

First published [v1.0] 15:34 GMT 5th February 2001; this version [v1.1 - add graphics] dated 14:00 BST 13th June 2003

This is the common foundation study unit for the ORGANISATIONAL COMMUNICATION and INFORMATICS e-learning resources published and supported by Derek J. Smith (Chartered Engineer). For further information, please e-mail me.

Unit Aims and Outcomes: As a preliminary to more advanced study of information technology and/or organisational behaviour, this study unit presents a block of introductory knowledge relating to organisations, systems, and management in general. When you have completed it, you will be able to deploy with enhanced confidence and accuracy the specific skills and vocabulary listed below:

Specific Skills	Vocabulary
1. Describe and illustrate the fundamental interaction between a society, its organisations, its technology, and its individual members.	corporate governance; division of labour; emotional intelligence; Hollerith card; line management; neolithic revolution; organisational hierarchy
2. Use elementary systems theory to analyse organisational structures and processes from a systems perspective.	business system; cybernetics; interface; negative feedback; open vs closed system; system boundary; subsystem boundary; systems thinking
3. Identify a variety of organisational data types, and illustrate the process by which data becomes information.	data vs datum; data vs information
4. Apply the information pyramid when analysing the use of information by managers.	derived data; feeder system; operational level information; strategic level information; tactical level information; transaction
5. Describe how the demands of managing service provision differ between conditions of continuity and change.	continuity vs change; service provision vs service use

Unit Structure: This unit contains five short lessons, each contributing to the overall unit outcomes, each with its own hyperlinked support material, and each with its own additional reading and tutorial task(s). Here is the learning sequence:

Lesson FN1.1: A History of Human Organisations

Lesson FN1.2: The Nature of Systems

Lesson FN1.3: Data and Information

Lesson FN1.4: Information and Management

Lesson FN1.5: Management and Service Provision

So Where To Next?

References

Lesson FN1.1: A History of Human Organisations

Nature is all about organising scarce resources to best effect in an extremely hostile world, and many insect and mammal species would never have flourished to the extent that they have had it not been for their readiness to work together for the common good. Nevertheless, the sort of organisation found in lower animals is totally instinctive. Every ant is born with the blueprint for its anthill etched in an as-yet-undeciphered code into its nervous system. Humans, on the other hand, organise themselves more reflectively. The first human organisations were probably small ad hoc groups who by trial and error had learned how to co-operate in such things as hunting, foraging, or defence. These largely learned behaviours would have been typical of life in the Old Stone (palaeo-lithic) Age, some two and a half million years ago, and the necessary skills would simply have been passed down from each generation to the next as part of a rudimentary cultural inheritance. Little then changed until the flourishing of Cro-Magnon man only 40,000 years ago, when the complexity of life suddenly started to accelerate. This period - sometimes called the "upper" palaeolithic - is when the archaeological record starts to reveal more and more complex artefacts, personal adornments, and cave art, and all of these new skills imply yet more things to be organised [For an introduction to life at the beginning of the Old Stone Age, click here, and for life at the end of it, click here.]

The Old Stone Age is conventionally regarded as having ended around 12,000 years ago in a short transitional period known as the Middle Stone (meso-lithic) Age, when more and more of our ancestors gave up their hunter-gatherer existence in favour of building permanent shelters, raising crops, and domesticating cattle. Inventions such as the sledge, the canoe, and rope have been dated to this period. The pace of change then accelerated again around 8,500 years ago with the New Stone (neo-lithic) Age. This was the period of the neolithic revolution, when homestead life became village life, and thence civilisation itself. Inventions such as bricks and mortar, pottery, weaving, and the bow and arrow all date from this period, and there is visible tribute to the sophistication of neolithic organisations in the archaeological sites at Uruk in Iraq, Catal Hüyük in Turkey, and Jericho in Israel. Organisations such as councils of elders probably date from the beginning of this period, and the first recognisable factory would have been set up towards the end of it - say around 6,000 years ago - as the technology for smelting bronze started to be developed.

In fact, smelting was a truly fundamental advance, not only because it marked the transition out of the Stone Age and into the Bronze Age, but also because it would have required a complex organisation of fuel gathering, ore quarrying, casting, and working. The products of smelting could not simply be plucked when ripe from the vine, but needed to be reduced by fire and then painstakingly wrought into shape [for a glimpse of what was involved, click here]. As a result, they would have acquired massive exchange value, and those who could organise the industry would have been handsomely rewarded. It is probably no coincidence, therefore, that the arrival of the first great empires coincided with trading inventions such as the planked ship and money. The first civil services emerged around 5,500 years ago in the Mesopotamian, Egyptian, and Chinese empires, and would have been responsible for the collection of taxes [for a nice introduction to the history of human taxation, click here], for administering the first standing armed forces, and for maintaining the first public works, eg. road building and sanitation.

What is harder to track down is the rise of big business. We cannot, for example, exclude the possibility that the bartering of goods and services went on not just in Cro-Magnon times, but throughout the Stone Ages. Nevertheless, the earliest clearly recorded trading system is that of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia. One of the leading researchers here is Denise Schmandt-Besserat of the University of Texas at Austin, who has studied the use of small clay tokens to symbolise units of merchandise. These begin to be used for rural transactions from as early as 10,000 years ago, but by 5,500 years ago had acquired a complex variety of shapes and markings, and had been adopted in the new cities [for pictures and further details, click here]. In much the same vein, William Goetzmann of the Yale School of Management places the first recognisable bank in Uruk in Mesopotamia, around 5,000 years ago [click for details]. The first formally codified legal system was the Codex Hammurabi around 3,800 years ago, and by the heyday of the Greek and Roman empires Humankind had established a vibrant way of life, which only natural calamity and war could interrupt.

In the event, it was war, indeed, which brought about the fall of the Roman empire and ushered in the European Dark Ages. This was a period of slow but steady development, in which Europe remained broken up into smaller kingdoms, China maintained the great bureaucratic imperial dynasties, and the Middle East alternated between Byzantine and Islamic hegemony. Commerce, too, was unremarkable, although the Domesday Book (1086) went out of its way to record a number of economic indices. It was from the outset an "inquisition of lands" (Halsall, 1996), requiring each manor in the kingdom to state, amongst other things, "how many woods, how much meadow, how many mills, and how many fishponds" [for further extracts, click here]. But it was the strategic use of land as an investment commodity which changed the ensuing millennium (Parkinson, 1977). It was real estate which bankrolled the Renaissance and the discovery of the Americas, to say nothing of starting a succession of trade wars between Spain, France, Holland, and Britain.

As for technology and science, these made some progress in mediaeval times (eg. gunpowder and printing), but then surged after Galileo's death in 1642. Steam power brought about the first industrial revolution in the 18th Century, with the first successful attempts at mass production being at the pulley-block factories in the Royal Naval Dockyards between 1803 and 1808, closely followed by Eli Terry's clock factory in Connecticut in 1809. This laid the groundwork for 20th Century advances in production such as that made by Henry Ford in the production of the motor car.

And as for IT, the story begins with Joseph-Marie Jacquard's card-programmed weaving loom [click for details] in 1801 and Charles Babbage's analytical engine [click for details] in 1837, and continues with the mechanisation of the 1890 US Census. This latter was a census much like that which had brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem, but it was the first one to have its data processed automatically. The key invention was a punched card data storage system developed by Herman Hollerith [click for details], and the fortune he made out of this invention went towards founding what is now the IBM Corporation. The "first generation" of digital computers emerged in the late 1940s as curiosities of military science, the "second generation" became available commercially in the 1950s, and the rest, as they say, is history. [For a fuller account, click here.] In August 1980, the current author wrote his first COBOL program using Hollerith cards, and executed it on a third generation British Telecom mainframe.

LESSON RATIONALE: So why does all this matter? Why do we begin our study of 21st Century organisations in the Stone Age, and why are we repeatedly drawn to the nature of the technology? Well we do this for three separate, but nevertheless closely related, reasons:

Firstly, because the relationship between technology and culture is nothing short of intimate. No sooner does a successful invention "hit the streets", than it becomes part of life itself. It becomes the accepted way to do things; the right way to skin a carcase in an earlier Age, or the right way to spend an evening in the TV Age. This is fine up to a point, but it is never long before ever-creative consumers push that invention beyond its intended limits, often detrimentally. Thus with the telephone came the nuisance caller, with TV came copycat violence, with the automobile came pollution, and so on; and with organisations came depersonalisation, corruption, abuse of power, stress, social polarisation, exploitation, and corporate manslaughter. The study of organisations is therefore nothing less than the study of Humankind itself.

Secondly, there is no discernible difference between the brains of Cro-Magnon Man, and our own. This strongly implies that were it possible to time-switch a 21st Century baby with a Cro-Magnon one, the former would have thrived perfectly well hunting reindeer in 20,000 BC, and the latter would grow up perfectly able to use the Internet! Or to put it another way, the true essence of a society lies not in its physical make-up, but rather in its organisations. We are what the organisations which surround us teach us to be, not what we are born.

Thirdly, if you study the instinctive and emotional parts of the brain, you find a clear line of inheritance all the way back through the transitional species to non-human primates similar to the modern chimpanzee. What we know and do may be different, but what we feel when we are angry or aggrieved has probably changed little in five million years! This is relevant to the way humans function instinctively in an organisational setting.

This last point is at the heart of Daniel Goleman's argument that we need to be in touch with our emotional intelligence. It is also the central thesis of the recent and highly recommended book "Managing the Human Animal" by Nigel Nicholson of the London Business School [for details, click here], and is the main barrier to delivering the sort of "morally excellent" corporate governance now required of the world's organisations by the world's stock exchanges [for a thought-provoking introduction to which, click here].

In the final analysis, therefore, what interests us throughout our programmes is the way information flows within large organisations. What are the laws thereof, and how many of the real decisions are made by the highly emotional animal within us? As you work your way through your chosen study programme, you will be repeatedly drawn back to these basic questions. Students wishing to forge ahead will find a major presentation of the role of instinct in human communication in Unit OC3 "Communication and the Naked Ape", in our 1996 work on evolutionary psychology, "Brain and Communication", and in our 1997 work on the evolution of cognitive architectures, Smith and Stringer (1997).

EXERCISES (AND STANDARD STUDY TIMES): Depending on how thoroughly you have been exploring the hyperlinks provided, it has probably taken you less than 30 minutes to read the foregoing text, and now you have to do some real work. Complete the following exercises, taking careful note of the expected study times:
FN1.1.1	Obtain dictionary definitions of the terms "division of labour" and "line management". [10 minutes, once you have located a suitable encyclopaedia (electronic or conventional).]
FN1.1.2	Observe the division of labour and line management structure within your organisation, and use this to draw up a simple organisational structure chart. [This should take an hour or two fact-finding, followed by 30 minutes preparing the diagram.] CAUTION: This is a training exercise in the graphical presentation of organisational hierarchies, so avoid disclosing potentially sensitive information. Preferably restrict yourself to information already in the public domain (for example from Annual Reports, Stock Exchange analyses, etc.). Work on a "need to know" basis, and do not give names, contact details, or specific addresses.
Submitting Exercises for Assessment and Feedback (Fee-Paying Clients Only): Simply e-mail your answer(s) for full tutorial feedback. State each conclusion clearly, and briefly explain how you arrived at it. You may do this one exercise at a time, or all at once. Additional questions may then be asked, and additional tasks given as required. [Submit an Exercise] Please cooperate with this student-tutor exchange, because it will eventually form the basis of your individual student progress record. Do not proceed to Lesson FN1.2 until all the tutorial tasks are completed and signed off.

Lesson FN1.2: The Nature of Systems

In Lesson FN1.1, we saw not only how few truly fundamental human inventions there have ever been, but also how the resulting technologies have always shaped, rather than been shaped by, the cultures into which they were born. Thus:

The Fundamental Inventions	The Periods	The Cultural Impacts
Stone axe (as weapon and tool)	Old Stone Age	Tribal life; ?barter
Agriculture and rural crafts	Middle Stone Age	Village life; ?barter
Urban crafts and money	New Stone Age	Town life; trade
Smelting	Bronze and Iron Ages	Cities and empires; laws and wars; civil and commercial organisations
Watermill, windmill, printing, science, and education	Renaissance	Nation states; modern banking and world trade; trade wars
Steam, steel, transport, and communications	First Industrial Revolution	Mass production and total war
Automated data processing and mass communication	Second Industrial Revolution	Consumerism and mutually assured destruction

There is also much to be learned by getting right back to basics and looking at technology as the generation and subsequent control of energy. After all, one of Humankind's greatest problems has always been the relative weakness of the human body. Ever since civilisation began, humans have struggled to supplement their physical strength by external means wherever possible. They have used draught animals to pull their ploughs and carts, and variations on the "mighty five" simple inventions (the lever, the wheel, the inclined plane, the screw, and the wedge) to move their obstacles and erect their buildings. But the bigger the weight involved, the greater the risk of accident and injury. All power sources - be they your own muscles, harnessed oxen, rushing water, wind, steam, or whatever - require control, and the more powerful the power source, the finer that control needs to be. The name given to the resulting technology is control engineering. Here is a brief history of its rise to fame:

The Fundamental Inventions	The Energy Source	The Control Mechanism
Stone axe	One's own muscles	The operator's brain, applied directly
Light agricultural crafts, eg. digging, hoeing, and scratch-ploughing	One's own muscles	The operator's brain, applied directly. Cockburn (1992) believes these were womens' crafts, and that the tools were possibly women's inventions.
Heavy agricultural crafts, eg. deep ploughing and raising water	The muscles of draught animals or slaves	The operator's brain, applied via whip, goad, or spoken instruction
Heavy urban crafts, eg. construction and public works	The muscles of draught animals or slaves	The operator's brain, applied via whip, goad, or spoken instruction, and assisted by the "mighty five"
Smelting	Charcoal or coal	The operator's brain, by designing the furnace in the first place, and then in controlling the air supply
Sailing	The wind	The operator's brain, via rigging or rudder, but subject in a large vessel to strategic direction from above
Watermill and windmill	Gravity and wind	The operator's brain, applied via levers, pulleys, and gear-trains UNTIL Lee's (1745) fantail and Mead's (1787) centrifugal governor made it automatic
Steam engine	Wood or coal	The operator's brain, applied via valves etc., UNTIL James Watt borrowed the centrifugal governor from the millers in 1788 and made it automatic

Given the importance of control, it is not surprising that one of modern technology's greatest traditions - the science of cybernetics - can be traced back to early experiments with the steering of ships and the automatic control of heavy machinery [click for history]. The classics here are Lee's (1745) fantail mechanism [click for picture] and Mead's (1787) centrifugal governor [click for picture], both textbook examples of negative feedback control mechanisms. Formal theories of systems did not appear, however, until the early 20th century. Lotka (1925, cited in Kramer and de Smit, 1977) was the first to speak of "open systems", Cannon (1927) introduced the concept of homeostasis to explain a whole variety of biological phenomena, and Von Bertalanffy (1932) further developed the vocabulary of what he called "system theory". And what all such explanations have in common is the fact that they take all-purpose rules derived from a wide range of exemplar systems and apply these as abstract principles to other systems, including those about which little is currently known. System theory is thus the science of the global explanatory principle. Here is an entry-level vocabulary:

Mini Glossary - System Theory

Ashby's Law of Requisite Variety: A systems law which states in essence that a control system always has to be more complicated than the system it is controlling. The law which - although he may not have known it at the time - led the editor of the Northwestern Miller to write in 1883 that "the fact that a mill is automatic is one reason why it cannot have automatons to run it" (cited in Storck and Teague, 1952:285)!

Attributes: The qualities of an entity, such as its size and weight, etc.; anything which assists an entity's detection and identification.

Closed System: See Exercise FN1.2.1. (Compare open system.)

Entities: "The elements or parts of a system" (Kramer and de Smit, 1977:14), especially objects and things. They are "to a significant degree discontinuous with the environment that contains them" (Salthe, 1985:23). Their individual qualities are known as attributes, and they influence each other through relations.

General System Theory (GST): An attempt by Von Bertalanffy (1956) to develop a mathematically exact theory in the non-physical sciences. A formal mathematical model of the interactions between the subsystems making up a larger system.

Governor: A mechanism for maintaining a piece of machinery at a given speed. "..... part of a machine by means of which the velocity of the machine is kept nearly uniform, notwithstanding variations in the driving-power or the resistance" (Maxwell, 1867:270).

Homeostasis: Cannon's (1927) term for negative feedback control systems in biology.

Interface: A point of data exchange between two systems or subsystems.

Open System: See Exercise FN1.2.1. (Compare closed system.)

Relation: "The way in which two or more entities are dependent on each other" (Kramer and de Smit, 1977:15). "A relation exists 'if a change in a property of one entity results in a change in a property of another entity'" (Kramer and de Smit, 1977:16; italics original).

Subsystem: "A functional component of a larger system which fulfils the conditions of a system in itself, but which also plays a role in the operation of a larger system" (Young, 1964, cited in Kramer and de Smit, 1977:26).

Subsystem Boundary: The dividing line between a subsystem and the remainder of the system surrounding that subsystem. Subsystem boundaries need to be carefully identified because they are often, by their nature, the location of an interface. You will need to know how to position subsystem boundaries when boundary setting for a new computerisation project [see Lesson IT2.1].

System: "A set of interrelated entities of which no subset is unrelated to any other subset" (Kramer and de Smit, 1977:14). "A set or assemblage of things connected, associated, or independent, so as to form a complex unity; a whole composed of parts in orderly arrangement according to some scheme or plan" (O.E.D.).

System Boundary: The dividing line between a system and its system environment.

System Environment: "That set of entities outside the system, the state of which set is affected by the system or which affect the state of the system itself" (Kramer and de Smit, 1977:34).

Systems Thinking: A way of looking at organisations as fundamentally similar, even when superficially different. The search for their fundamental laws. A common language for scientists in different disciplines. A set of abstract rules and principles. The science of complex organisations.

LESSON RATIONALE: And why does all this matter? Because the word "system" is loosely used in practice, meaning different things to different people, and greatly confusing the inexperienced. The relationship between systems and subsystems is particularly troublesome, because as soon as you have identified the subsystem you are interested in, it tends to become the system you wish to talk about next. Here are some exercises to help you master this terminology:

EXERCISES (AND STANDARD STUDY TIMES): Depending on how thoroughly you have been exploring the hyperlinks provided, it has probably taken you less than 30 minutes to read the foregoing text, and now you have to do some real work. Complete the following exercises, taking careful note of the expected study times:
FN1.2.1	Obtain dictionary definitions of the terms "open system" and "closed system". Locate examples of both in your workplace. [30 minutes, once you have located a suitable technical dictionary]
FN1.2.2	*Identify a negative feedback control system in your workplace. What is its comparator? [This should take an hour or two fact-finding, followed by 30 minutes answering the direct question]*
FN1.2.3	Decide whether (a) a ship at sea, (b) your body, and (c) your organisation, are systems or sets of subsystems. Name five subsystems for each, one with sub-subsystems of its own. [30 minutes.]
Submitting Exercises for Assessment and Feedback (Fee-Paying Clients Only): Simply e-mail your answer(s) for full tutorial feedback. State each conclusion clearly, and briefly explain how you arrived at it. You may do this one exercise at a time, or all at once. Additional questions may then be asked, and additional tasks given as required. [Submit an Exercise] Please cooperate with this student-tutor exchange, because it will eventually form the basis of your individual student progress record. Do not proceed to Lesson FN1.3 until all the tutorial tasks are completed and signed off.

Lesson FN1.3: Data and Information

The word "data" derives from the Latin verb dare, "to give". Specifically, it is the plural of datum, "that which is given" (O.E.D.), so literally it means "things which are given". Data are thus things which are "known or assumed as fact, and made the basis of reasoning or calculation". The word started to acquire a technical usage in the 17th Century (O.E.D.), but the practice of recording numbers with scratches and lines goes back at least to the Cro-Magnon cave paintings [picture not yet available]. Other techniques were tally sticks into which notches were cut [example not yet located], the Sumerian clay tokens already described, and the kill-notching of trusted weapons [for examples, click here or here (scrolling down to the fifth image).]

Another useful concept is the "proposition", in its philosophical sense. To cognitive scientists, a proposition is the smallest unit of truth, and thus the foundation of all knowledge, both individual and organisational. Here are some example propositions, each showing how the knowledge unit (a) might have been recorded as data in the olden days, and (b) could be coded into binary nowadays:

Example 1:

Category of Data	Decision to be Supported	Propositional Truth	Example Data
Autobiographical	People over 65 must retire, so I need to know if I am 65 yet	I am 67.	Ancient: 67 notches cut into a tally stick, or 67 beads on a string, or 67 accumulated clay tokens. Modern: the binary code 01000011 burnt into a CD-ROM at an appropriate point

Example 2:

Category of Data	Decision to be Supported	Propositional Truth	Example Data
Economic transaction	Evidence of debt	<X owes me> <the debt is 1 goat>	Ancient: 1 accumulated clay goat token stored in some way as to denote it as a debt and identified in some way as on X's account; 1 notch on the tally-stick held to X's account. Modern: the binary code 00000001 burnt into a CD-ROM at an appropriate point

The world brims with such data, of course, and you will already notice a pattern. The data counting - the tallying itself - is actually the easy bit! It is converting it into the desired propositional truth - the interpretation of the data - which takes the time. With a CD-ROM, for example, there are 600 million places to store the binary code 00000001 to record that missing goat, and millions of other propositions which could be recorded using the same byte of filestore if we chose to free it up. So the processing part of data processing needs to know with total precision where to look for its raw data. It needs to know which tally-stick to cut into when a new fact arrives, and which to break when that fact ceases to be true. And providing it gets it right, you end up with usable information, that which allows decisions to be made.

Here is this relationship expressed visually .....

Data Þ Data Processing Þ Information

Information Þ Decision Making Þ Decision

Decision Þ PROFIT OF SOME SORT

LESSON RATIONALE: And why does all this matter? Because your ability to profit from your raw data will rapidly erode if there are any weaknesses in the intermediate processes. High profits require good decision making, which requires precise and timely information, which requires total perfection in data storage and extraction.

EXERCISES (AND STANDARD STUDY TIMES): Depending on how thoroughly you have been exploring the hyperlinks provided, it has probably taken you less than 30 minutes to read the foregoing text, and now you have to do some real work. Complete the following exercises, taking careful note of the expected study times:
FN1.3.1	You open your wallet / handbag and see that your credit card is not where it should be. What are the next three data stores you need to access, and what information do you need from each? [30 minutes.]
Submitting Exercises for Assessment and Feedback (Fee-Paying Clients Only): Simply e-mail your answer(s) for full tutorial feedback. State each conclusion clearly, and briefly explain how you arrived at it. You may do this one exercise at a time, or all at once. Additional questions may then be asked, and additional tasks given as required. [Submit an Exercise] Please cooperate with this student-tutor exchange, because it will eventually form the basis of your individual student progress record. Do not proceed to Lesson FN1.3 until all the tutorial tasks are completed and signed off.

Lesson FN1.4: Information and Management

We saw in the preceding lesson that data remains "raw" until interpreted in some way in readiness for decision making of some sort. We now complicate matters by adding that decision making varies with the managerial level concerned, that is to say, with the "seniority" of the manager who is using it. The information pyramid is often used to convey the differences. According to this model, there are three major levels of information, namely, operational, tactical, and strategic, as defined below.

The Information Pyramid

	Strategic Information: This is information needed by the CEO and those at the top of the corporate hierarchy. It is highly abstracted and summarised, and typically relates to the organisation as a whole rather than to its individual divisions. It bears little resemblance to the operational information it fundamentally derives from.
	Tactical Information: This is the information needed by those part-way up the corporate hierarchy (who will usually be the managers of the ones at the bottom). It is not as detailed as operational information. In fact, it frequently summarises it (by group, perhaps, or by time period). For this reason, it is often termed derived data, and the systems which provide it are termed feeder systems.
	Operational Information: This is the information needed by those at the bottom of the corporate hierarchy. It is detailed "transaction level" information relating to the day-to-day running of the divisions of the corporation.

LESSON RATIONALE: And why does all this matter? Well for those following the Informatics programme it is because a high proportion of global data processing effort (ie. tens of billions of pounds worth annually) goes into moving data up and down the information pyramid, and for those following the Organisational Communication programme it is because a similarly high proportion of everything which is ever communicated (potentially many trillions of words daily) goes into supporting this same activity. One would only have to make the process 0.1% more efficient, therefore, to become significantly wealthy!

EXERCISES (AND STANDARD STUDY TIMES): Depending on how thoroughly you have been exploring the hyperlinks provided, it has probably taken you less than 30 minutes to read the foregoing text, and now you have to do some real work. Complete the following exercises, taking careful note of the expected study times:
FN1.4.1	(a) List 5 facts relevant to your organisation's storekeeper. (b) List 5 facts relevant to an organisation's production manager. (c) List 5 facts relevant to you, but not your boss, then 5 facts relevant to your boss, but not to you, and finally 5 facts relevant to both of you.
Submitting Exercises for Assessment and Feedback (Fee-Paying Clients Only): Simply e-mail your answer(s) for full tutorial feedback. State each conclusion clearly, and briefly explain how you arrived at it. You may do this one exercise at a time, or all at once. Additional questions may then be asked, and additional tasks given as required. [Submit an Exercise] Please cooperate with this student-tutor exchange, because it will eventually form the basis of your individual student progress record. Do not proceed to Lesson FN1.5 until all the tutorial tasks are completed and signed off.

Lesson FN1.5: Management and Service Provision

In the final lesson in this study unit, we look at the interaction between an organisation's division of labour and the provision of services across both vertical (ie. interdepartmental) and horizontal (ie. seniority) barriers. This is vital to understanding information flow in organisations, but the theory is actually rather simple, and can be summarised in two simple propositions. The first proposition is that everyone in an organisation provides a service of some sort as laid down in their job description, and the second is that the systems which provide those services - and they can be either manual or computer systems - can only ever in the final analysis be in a state of continuity or change. This means - again in the final analysis - that there are only really four types of management, namely running a service or changing it, and using a service or changing how you use it. Here is the same argument expressed graphically using a Johari window:

The Continuity-Change Johari for Service Provision or Use

[Johari window for service porovision or use]

Note how managerial demands - and accordingly the decision making required to meet those demands - depend upon what you happen to be doing at the moment in question. When continuity is being managed - such as when you struggle to maintain the provision of a service of some sort - the focus of managerial effort is on incident handling. When change is being managed, on the other hand, you find yourself constantly making system design decisions. We point this out because few managers are lucky enough to manage only continuity or only change or only service provision or only service use. Most managers are continuers and changers and providers and users, all more or less at once.

LESSON RATIONALE: So why does all this matter? Because as a manager you need to know precisely where you are in the continuity-change Johari. You need to be constantly aware, whenever you open your mouth, exactly what system it is you are talking about, and exactly what relationship exists between it and you; and this is far harder to achieve in practice than you might think!

EXERCISES (AND STANDARD STUDY TIMES): Depending on how thoroughly you have been exploring the hyperlinks provided, it has probably taken you less than 30 minutes to read the foregoing text, and now you have to do some real work. Complete the following exercises, taking careful note of the expected study times:
FN1.5.1	Research what laws, precedents, and codes of practice govern the release of potentially sensitive information to outsiders. If your organisation is subject to Stock Exchange regulations this will include the legal aspects of "insider trading". [A day or two asking around at work]
FN1.5.2	From your own workplace, find examples of: (a) computer system input form (eg. an overtime claim form) (b) computer system screen print (c) computer system output report (d) manual system numerical analysis (eg. a handwritten timesheet) (e) manual card index file (eg. a drawer of handwritten address filecards)
FN1.5.3	List all the services you are a service-provider for, and 5 services you are a service-user for. Think of a service provision failure you have helped, as provider, to repair. How did you first hear of that failure's occurrence? Think of a service which, as user, keeps letting you down. Have you complained? To whom? Did it work? CAUTION: This is a training exercise, so avoid disclosing potentially sensitive information. Restrict yourself to information already in the public domain (for example from Annual Reports, Stock Exchange analyses, etc.), work on a "need to know" basis, and do not give names, contact details, or specific addresses.
FN1.5.4	Using your Internet browsing skills, prepare a short folio of study material on the topic of "information pyramid". Estimate what percentage of your working week is spent providing other departments within your organisation with operational data. List some of the decisions they make with it, and at least one decision they could and should make, but do not. [This should take an hour or two fact-finding, followed by 30 minutes answering the direct question]
FN1.5.5	Using your Internet browsing skills, prepare a short folio of study material on the topic of "derived data". Estimate what percentage of your working week is spent providing other departments within your organisation with derived data. List some of the decisions they make with it, and at least one decision they could and should make, but do not. [This should take an hour or two fact-finding, followed by 30 minutes answering the direct question.]
Submitting Exercises for Assessment and Feedback (Fee-Paying Clients Only): Simply e-mail your answer(s) for full tutorial feedback. State each conclusion clearly, and briefly explain how you arrived at it. You may do this one exercise at a time, or all at once. Additional questions may then be asked, and additional tasks given as required. [Submit an Exercise] Please cooperate with this student-tutor exchange, because it will eventually form the basis of your individual student progress record. Do not proceed until all the tutorial tasks are completed and signed off.

So Where To Next?

If you have got to this point by mistake, click to return as appropriate:

Otherwise, congratulations!! You have reached the end of the foundation unit, and may now click to proceed with the chosen programme. Good luck!

Click to proceed to the INFORMATICS programme

Click to proceed to the ORGANISATIONAL COMMUNICATION programme

References

Cannon, W.B. (1927). The James-Lange theory of emotion: A critical examination and an alternative theory. American Journal of Psychology, 39:106-124.

Derry, T.K.& Williams, T.I. (1960). A Short History of Technology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kramer, J. & de Smit, J. (1977). Systems Thinking. Leiden: Nijhoff.

Lee, E. (1745). Self-Regulating Wind Machine. British Patent #615.

Lotka, A.J. (1925). Elements of Physical Biology. Baltimore, MD: Williams & Wilkins.

Maxwell, J.C. (1867). On governors. Proceedings of the Royal Society, 16:270-283.

Mead, T. (1787). Regulator for Wind and Other Mills. British Patent #1628.

Nicholson, N. (2000). Managing the Human Animal. London: Texere. [Recommended purchase.]

Parkinson, C. Northcote (1977). The Rise of Big Business. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson.

Salthe, S.N. (1985). Evolving Hierarchical Systems. New York: Columbia University Press.

Storck, J. & Teague, W.D. (1952). Flour for Man's Bread: A History of Milling. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Von Bertalanffy, L. (1932). Theoretische Biologie. Berlin: Bornträger.

Von Bertalanffy, L. (1950). An outline of General System Theory. British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 1:134-165.

Young, O.R. (1964). A survey of general systems theory. General Systems, IX.