2007/08/09 14:40 Systems Applications in Business and Industry, Session 2, ISSS Tokyo 2007
This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. The content should not be viewed as an official transcript of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. The digest has been made available for purposes of scholarship, posted on the ISSS web site by David Ing.
Chaired by David Ing
Context as posted in the pre-conference description.
K.C. Wang
Chinese five elements
Transformation: spring summer fall winter
At birth, can use ST strategies
Growth: SO
Harvest: WO
Storage WT
Comments
Simultaneous?
- Use five changes to place focus
- If we take all five changing simultaneously, it's too possible
Weakness at one point doesn't permit progressing to the next stage
Resources for the current period, versus the next period
Michael G. Norton
Eco-towns as a way of creating a more sustainable system
(1) What system are eco-towns in?
(2) Eco-towns as a cluster?
Porter's work possibly a policy lemon
Eco-towns: Japanese policy to cycle, so that wastes seen as a raw material as more useful to something else
- Not economically feasible, so MITI created special conditions to jump a new industry based on recycling
- Create raw materials and a revenue stream
- Policy is now 10 years old, successes
Potentially externality: can't deal with demand from Japan that handles new materials
- Thus, no wastes as resources
Failure at the global level
- Trade and environment
Competing theories of clusters and eco-towns
- Rely on collaboration rather than competition, and manipulation on the background regulations
But then, are eco-towns too engineered, so that Porter competition would help?
- Two separate policies of clusters and eco-towns, not connected, might consider connecting the two
[Comments]
Example as local innovation systems?
- Ecotowns have both national and local aspects
- National grants; local innovation because waste can't be moved without cost
- Waste is low-value
- Porter's cluster theory says companies should be close to each other, and become rivals
- Eco-towns may be innovative to start with, but then after they're running, no impetus to innovation
Competitiveness versus lifestyle
- MITI industry clusters are heavy in bureaucracy
- If the bureaucracy doesn't recognize an ecotown, and individual doesn't recognize it
Eco-towns as closed systems?
- Policy to improve resource utilization, which is already quite high
- Want cycles to go from 10% use to 40% use
- Also to stimulate local economies
- Eco-towns aren't set, they're bid
- Local enterprise, local initiatives towards national
- Originally thought of as local
- In the UK, recycle market for cans and papers have disappeared, because they can't get the raw materials, or can't bid enough for it
- A truckload of waste paper can get more money putting it into a container to ship to China
Eco-towns intended to be self-sustaining?
- Yes, fees end at 2005
- Capacity for waste recycle aren't operating at 90%, but down to 70%
- EU electrical utility recycling, it's accepted that companies can re-export computers, etc. for recovery, but only if they have the same standards for recover
- That's extra-territoriality
First five years of Kyushu and Nakamura were productive, and have now reached a stable level
- Creation of Japanese government, question of trade policy and external affairs
Takafuma Nakamura
Providing maintenance systems for field engineers
Understand system failure holistically
IT trouble-shooting has 3 main shortcomings
- It's mature and hard to understand outside of technology; leads to quick fix, damaging the organization
- Primary troubleshooting as event chain analysis:
- Toyota, ask why 5 times to understand root causes -- leads to finding a big thing, rather than really finding a root cause
- Rapid technological change
Tacit responsibility is fuzzy
To make a breakthough counter-measure, three keys:
- Have a common language to understand a system failure
- Safety, should understand root cause
- Should have meta-methodology rather than a quick fix
- Meta-methodology will enhance double loop learning
- Meta-methodology suggested by Jackson: van Gigch, taxonomy of a system failure, from real world to modelling world
- Identify organizational function responsible
- Stafford Beer: System I to III, and homeostatic IV, system V for outer environmental change
- Again, could be myopic
- Event chain models, on proximate events
- VSM can help approach correctly
Combine common language, van Gigch and VSM into a single model
SO spacemap: responsibility amongst stakeholders
- Ensure countermeasure is confirmed
- Holistically
- Ensure double-loop learning
[Comments]
Combining SOSM and VSM
- Have two dimensions of SOSM: system dimension (simple / complex), participation (unitary, plural, coercive), VSM as third dimension
Differences? Policy analysis versus SOSF
- SOSF is one part of SOSM
- e.g. miscommunication may result putting it an another area
If SOSF in mind?
- Technical resolution, versus organizational resolution
- Human component in IT: communication, management or culture
Application in non-hierarchical organizations?
- Business organizations
Difficult to retrain engineers in new method?
SO space map?
- Subjective and Objective
- e.g. view of responsibilities
Someone in job for more than 5 years is hard to retrain
Root cause?
Customer's perspective
