Easily available and widely used, social media tools look like a boon for small, nonprofit organizations that need systemic approaches for disseminating information and cultivating networks for donor and member engagement, especially those relying on a few paid staff and many good-hearted volunteers to do the work. This case study examines the experiences of two nonprofit organizations and the complexities, constraints, and contextual challenges that have made adopting social media practices more difficult and less effective than industry advisers, researchers, and examples suggest. Leaders of these two education foundations describe themselves as caught between the demands of tending key person-to-person relationships and the additional duties associated with cultivating interactive relational networks through social media. The experiences described in this instrumental case study align with themes found across trans-disciplinary research on social media and organizations. These themes are social media, organizational capacity, and the changing concept of engagement.
The advent of digital transformation invading all societal and economic systems requires to re-consider the generative nature of socio-technical system design. Transformation needs to be studied, in particular how links are continuously explored and accelerated between existing as well new systems. The accelerated production of relations does not only substantiate system thinking, but also characterizes the fundamental nature of digital production systems.
As digital transformations are complex, some scholars have already called for a system science approach to deal with. Thereby, traditional cognitive or top-down approaches to regulate or control dynamic processes are seen as ‘last resort’. Evolving complex systems bear systemic challenges, which are wicked due to their social or cultural nature and incomplete, contradictory, interconnected, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize.
Bringing together complexity and wicked problems theories to understand how individual organizations and change agents can better influence large system change. We have developed a framework that helps to understand and cope with system interventions while taking the perspective of individual agents for change in organizations. Consequently, we do not only need to put forward theoretical understanding of transformation and change management by positioning the organization in the context of a broader system, but also need to define its role in creating change based on articulation of individual stakeholders. Individually informed articulation (e.g., on underlying principles for certain behavior patterns) is likely to facilitate addressing the nature of wicked problems by setting informed relations between individual systems and the large systems where they are embedded.
In articulation the relation of individuals as change agents and their relations to organizations and society in transformational change are considered. Sharing relational background knowledge and developing relations allow creating transformations that can be substantial and lead to emergence system behavior due to that change. In the presented samples stemming from organizational development, the essential role of individuals in a situated while cognitive transformation process becomes evident. In contrast to behavioral manipulation, cognitive transformation acts in a subjective environment. It can be experienced by everyone in the same situational context. Transformations are achieved to giving situations a different meaning than before.
We describe the partial results of a research in systems engineering for a specific socio-technical situation. It addresses the problem of urban circulation in Latin American cities not so technologically advanced. The rating of their circulation performance is very low, when travel times are considered, which produces big ecological, health and economic impacts. The problem is serious and it is still growing. The city traffic system is complex because of the large number of participants and because of the intricacies of their interrelationships. The difficulty of framing this research is observed in that it touches on five known thematic axes: Governance, Economy, Health, Ecology and Technology. The central idea to communicate is that the solution to the problem must be systemic. No feasible solutions will be obtained if the implemented actions are of trial-and-error nature, only technical or only social reductionist approaches, or copied from solutions designed for cities of different locations. The proposal is to gather the main city stakeholders at the systemic academic approach and to guide the improvement process with tested and validated effective actions. Some of the difficulties that have been detected so far concern: describing the unstructured problem; setting up the soft systemic model and finding the feasibility conditions for the solution. After looking at the literature on the subject, outstanding scientific advances are found in the topics of the ecological automobile, the autonomous vehicle or the smart city, with proposals based on electromechanical, communications, and computing fields. They are taken into account for the project, but their expectation for been operative does not make them affordable for this case. Nevertheless, many autonomous vehicle details could be useful under a systemic view: what makes it operational is the information exchange with its environment. The synergetic operation of traffic in a congested city requires a proper information usage. In several studied cases, the urban infrastructure does not inform the driver about the restrictions, the driver does not take advantage of information to execute his actions and the traffic regulation does not profit of information to provide corrective actions. Moreover, punitive measures are privileged over preventive ones. Solving the congestion questions of these cities would only be possible if improving actions are also committed to the physical infrastructure, the traffic regulations and the respectful driving subsystems. For this reason, organizational transformation is imperative. Within the project, coordination between soft and hard system models is analyzed, aiming to carry out simulations of identified noteworthy conflict situations. And feasibility will be particularly taken into account before implementation through the agreement of the administrative, technical and social parties, based on the research work conducted at the systemic academic guide.
The Province of Tierra del Fuego (Argentina) is an island with a legislation that has been promoting the industrial production for the last forty years. These situation has been generating diverse impacts in the social and economic order through the creation of employment, production for domestic consumption and exportation of that production to the continental zone of the country. Also, these effects were impacted or has been a consequence of national policies, economic development at national and international level. The present work is part of a bigger research which aim is to produce information about the fueguinian business structure, taking as an exponent the organizations of the technological industrial sector of the island.
The methodology of the present study is based on the consideration of the accounting information systems of each of the companies and, based on the overall analysis, seeks to deepen the information about this productive sector, highlighting the magnitudes and relations between capitals (understood as a source of financing for companies). For the recollecting data stage, a model called "Capital Relationships Map" has been designed to show some of these characteristics.
This analysis of relations allows us to consider the level of diversity as a property of capital, which is destined to the production of technological goods in the special customs area (Tierra del Fuego), and seeks to recognize sensitive elements that can cause a great impact changes to the local environment, resulting from this network of complex relationships.
Government services slowly enter new and promising era. The traditional way of organising public sector service delivery in western democracies is hierarchical. Hierarchical organisation means functional specialisation. Top layers of the hierarchy specify and specialise different parts of the hierarchy in the bottom to provide rather specific functions – services. Service provision is then fragmented. Citizen in need of long-term help often ends up using many services with low cooperation between them. These conditions lead to high costs and low quality. We currently can identify in Europe promising cases of institution which are organised as network organisations and sometimes even changed their structures from hierarchal type with great success. In this paper, we discuss what drives hierarchical organisation ineffectiveness when supporting people suffering with complex problems and what are some of the crucial conditions to organise successful network based integrated services. There are four principles discussed that are common to successful network organisations which are very different from the principles of hierarchically organised institutions – holistic service provision, flat organisation structure, high trust and capability measurement. These principles are shown on three cases - Jeugdbescherming Regio Amsterdam (aka Child Protect, Netherlands), Karolinska University Hospital (Sweden) and Buurtzorg (health and social services, Netherlands).
Globally, digital solutions are gaining prominence and their prevalence and proliferation is evident by the rate of adoption by the masses. Organizations in government, civil, commercial and business domains are increasingly adopting digital to reach out to customers and impact them in ways that were not possible earlier. Digital technologies are far more pervasive now and their mass adoption has enabled information generation, and application in the form of information technology in different areas. The corner stone of digital technologies has been the creation, manipulation, and enhancement of meaningful information which significantly change the way organizations engage with their customers. Presently, there are practices, approaches, methods, life-cycle processes, frameworks, methodologies that help organizations in synthesizing, evaluating and implementing digital technologies in their respective areas of business. There are model based engineering and architecting approaches that have been found to be useful in computer-aided-generation of software systems from an expression of corresponding models. In all these situations, what comes to the fore is that most of the available approaches, follow the notion of “How to” do things rather than “why” it should be done, “what” should really be done” and “when” it should be done. This is further evident when we see that solutions in one area of application are not found to be useful in other areas. In other words, the digital solution patterns are useful for only one instance and are not useful for further instantiations. There are different schools of thought with regard to digital technologies and how businesses can utilize them. Gartner is of the view that the nexus of forces (Cloud, Mobile, Social, and Information) are the driving factors for digital technologies and related business. TCS is of the view that the digital five forces (Cloud, Big Data, Social, Mobility, and Robotics & Artificial intelligence) are the driving factors for digital technologies and related business. HBR is of the view that smart, connected, miniaturized devices (Internet of Things) are the driving force of digital technologies and related businesses. One thing that is evident from these views is that, all of them speak about the constituent parts but they do not say clearly: a) Why should these parts exists? b) Are these parts sufficient? c) How to put these parts together to form a whole? d) When should these parts be used? e) What is the evolution path of these parts? f) What could be evolution path of the whole? g) What is the underlying systems model for digital based solutions? This paper is an attempt to articulate the digital journey, the different levels of discourse in the digital journey and the possible evolution of the digital technologies to address the contextual knowledge needs of the human civilization. As an exemplar, the digital journey of supporting customer experiences design using digital technologies is taken up and illustrated in this paper.
The Beer´s Viable System Model (VSM) is a powerful tool for studying organizations as cohesive “wholes” and for evaluating their strategies counter to the complexity of the tasks they must perform. Primarily, it is a tool to diagnose the effectiveness of the structure of the organization, and offers a conceptual model of the information system to the management. It also allows assessing the consequences of organizations' policies.
Social and human actors are not trivial, they pursue ideals, ends, objectives, and have preferences and values, all of which may change. To model that, there are three dimensions to take in account: activities, structure and behavior.
The last dimension mentioned above, behavior, can be of interest at distinct levels: individuals, teams, organizational units, a whole organization, networks, etc. But a mere arrangement and the relationship with behaviors. And when took about behaviors, it´s necessary took about emotions, perceptions and cognition.
The VSM has been adopted by several researchers and practitioners for diagnosing organizational performance, and/or for (re)structuring organizations based on the factors essential and adequate for its long-term viability. In this paper, the scope is to design or change companies to assess and take responsibility for the company's effects on environmental and social wellbeing
