Managing Complex Systems

Managing Complex Systems

Principles of managing a complex system

I think that it is important to note what it means to have a complex system. In our textbook a complex system is described as followed. “A complex system is composed of many components. The behavior of one component influences the behavior of many other components. The system has an internal state, and its behavior does not depend solely on input but also on the state. The variety of the system that is, the number of states it can have, and the differences these states show are high. The system has many channels of interaction with the environment, and the variety of inputs and outputs is high.”(Bente 2012) With all of these characteristics, there must be a way to manage effectively. There are several guidelines, or principles that help an EA keep the network under control. These principles are stay at course granularity in analyzing complex systems. In other words understand your network to the best of your ability. Principle two is strengthening a complex system’s ability to change wins over optimizing the status quo. It is best to have a network that can sustain itself, rather than a quick fix. Plan for long term, not short. A company that used this principle is Travelocity. They decided to invest in metadata and creating a largescale database. In 2014, the stock of Travelocity was down and pressure was put on the CEO to make changes. Instead of using a lot of money in marketing they decided to revamp their system to rely on metadata. This has paid off for them, and now they lease their database to other competing companies at a high premium. Principle 3 Management, in particular EA, has about the same complexity as the system it manages. This means that it will take time and effort to manage a complex network. Principle 4. Complex systems (such as enterprises) cannot be managed at an object level but only at a meta level (management by rules). Since a complex network is ever changing and...