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DeSales University position announcement
Bill Roth has made further strides in forming his new social systems management program: he now has the go-ahead to hire another faculty member. Here is the basic description:
DeSales University in the Lehigh Valley of Pennsylvania is looking for a full-time faculty member in the field of management theory from the systems perspective. The person's primary responsibility will be to teach in a new PhD/DBA program modeled after the original Social Systems Sciences Program at The Wharton School. The program has already identified 80 potential students. It will be taught mainly or totally on-line. The person hired will help develop the program and recruit as well as teach. Hopefully, this will become a model for programs at other institutions. The teaching requirement will include 8 "courses" at the PhD, MBA, or undergraduate level per school year. Each graduate level subject taught will count as 1 1/2 "courses." Anyone interested, please contact Bill Roth at (610) 282-1100, ext. 1269, or br00@....
What does ‘network centric organization’ mean?
I didn't like this term at first, for the obvious reason that networks and centers don’t mix, but there are no other obvious cover terms for the phenomena in question. My formulation of it is this: “This term encompasses the organizational implications of a major shift in the economy. People once identified themselves with - centered on - an organization, a leader, a location. Now, people are increasingly oriented to cues they receive over communications networks and through social networks apart from the organizational hierarchy. This shift allows for or produces significant changes in practices, structure, and behavior. It is often not clear how to deal with this situation, either to take advantage of it or to mitigate losses and risk." That can be found on the community of practice website that the Navy is starting, www.netcentriccommunity.org.
People at the University of Maryland business school account for it differently, but you can see how it all ends up as systems talk: “Netcentricity - the power of digital networks to distribute information instantly and without borders. Characterized by global connectivity, real-time collaboration and rapid and continuous information exchange, netcentricity is a ubiquitous force reshaping every facet of our markets, organizational cultures, and personal lives at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Because of its enormous transforming power and pervasiveness, the netcentric revolution cannot be understood or influenced by any single element in isolation. A multi-disciplinary approach is required to address and study its comprehensive and inter-related dimensions.” Take a look at papers from their recent conference: https://www.rhsmith.umd.edu/dit/ditsymp/. Robert Zmud’s presentation was good, though his paper is a bit dull.
Special issue of iMP
Do you think you have something useful and non-academic to say about network centric organization? Submit an article to the online journal, iMP: The Magazine on Information Impacts. http://cisp.org/imp/april_2001/04_01contents.htm. iMP is planning a special issue on this subject for October. This journal is not peer-reviewed (except by the editor and, for this issue, by me), but it is well regarded and well read, and some very prominent people have written for it. In the current issue there is an article by Robert Litan and Alice Rivlin, "The Economy and the Internet: What Lies Ahead." Rivlin presented this material at the University of Maryland conference (see above) and will have it out as a book shortly.
Free journals
For a short time, Wiley is offering free access to the full text of Systems Research and Behavioral Science. http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/bold-ideas/bi_trial.html. The special issue on Checkland and soft systems methodology is interesting. For those of you asking "whither," see John P. van Gigch, "How to become a system guru? The path to energise system gurus of the new millennium to make system science more credible," 18, 83-88 (2001). He concludes: "The systems movement has always had a great potential but only in a few exceptional cases has seen this potential blossom to fruition."
World development
Paul Seabright reviewed Amartya Sen's Development as Freedom. http://www.nybooks.com/nyrev/WWWarchdisplay.cgi?20010329041R.We have all been led to believe that it is important to define development in terms of a comprehensive concept of capability and to not mistake it for growth and other crude measures. Seabright says that this line of argument won some time ago and that Sen is now pushing it too far -- against opponents who don't exist, and beyond its practical value. He says that it is better to stick to measures that politicians can be held to, and to avoid explaining development through the use of terms that themselves need explaining, such as freedom. Seabright's arguments are subtle and worth considering the next time you idealize.
Global Trends 2015: A Dialogue About the Future With Nongovernment Experts, NIC 2000-02, December 2000 http://www.odci.gov/cia/publications/globaltrends2015/index.html. This is well done, with input from top people. What makes it especially interesting is that it is a new version of a similar study done five years ago, and they discuss what was wrong and not understood in the prior version, and how they decided to change their method. It's breathtaking to see people demonstrate and document learning. Why is that so rare?
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