Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex System
Juarrero proposes a new framework for conceptualizing causes based on complex adaptive systems.
Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence
This book explains how the concepts of constraints provide a way to rethink relationships, opening the way to intentional, meaningful causation.
The impact of enterprise architecture management on information systems architecture complexity
Organisations without adequate EAM are likely to face large increases in technological complexity due to increasing organisational complexity, whereas organisations with adequate EAM exhibit no such relation.
Drift into Failure
This book explores complexity theory and systems thinking to understand better how complex systems drift into failure.
Requisite variety and its implications for the control of complex systems
Recent work on the fundamental processes of regulation in biology (Ashby, 1956) has shown the importance of a certain quantitative relation called the law of requisite variety. After this relation had been found, we appreciated that it was related to a theorem in a world far removed from the biological—that of Shannon on the quantity of noise or error that could be removed through a correction-channel (Shannon and Weaver, 1949; theorem 10). In this paper I propose to show the relationship between the two theorems, and to indicate something of their implications for regulation, in the cybernetic sense, when the system to be regulated is extremely complex. Since the law of requisite variety uses concepts more primitive than those used by entropy, I will start by giving an account of that law.
Revisiting the Impact of Information Systems Architecture Complexity: A Complex Adaptive Systems Perspective
Organizations constantly adapt their Information Systems (IS) architecture to reflect changes in their environment. In general, such adaptations steadily increase the complexity of their IS architecture, thereby negatively impacting IS efficiency and IS flexibility. Based on a Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS) perspective, we present a more differentiated analysis of the impact of IS architecture complexity. We hypothesize the relation between IS architecture complexity on the one hand, and IS efficiency and IS flexibility on the other hand to be mediated by evolutionary and revolutionary IS change. Subsequently, we test our hypotheses through a partial least squares (PLS) approach to structural equation modelling (SEM) based on survey data from 185 respondents. We find that the direct negative impact of IS architecture complexity on IS efficiency and IS flexibility is no longer statistically relevant when also considering the mediating effects of revolutionary and evolutionary IS change.