Triply Articulated Modelling of the Anticipatory Enterprise Philip Boxer, Boxer Research Ltd.
Professor Bernard Cohen, City U., London
Triply Articulated Modelling of the Anticipatory Enterprise Philip Boxer, Boxer Research Ltd.
Professor Bernard Cohen, City U., London
This work is founded upon certain ideas concerning the embodied actor and the risks she faces as an anticipatory system.
The time-honoured vehicle for the presentation of such ideas is the parable, so I will begin with one.
The Parable of the Frozen Bird
1. Once upon a time in Siberia, a peasant was making his way home across the frozen steppe and looking forward to the warm dinner waiting for him.
2. Suddenly, he saw on the road a little bird whose wing had frozen to the ground and who was still feebly fluttering.
3. He took pity on the little creature, released its wing gently from the ice and pressed it against his body to keep it warm.
4. After a little while, he noticed that the presence of the bird had considerably slowed his progress towards his warm dinner and he began to regret his act of charity.
5. Suddenly, he saw on the road a steaming pile of dung recently left behind by a passing reindeer.
6. He placed the bird gently into the dungto thaw it out and continued homeward at his earlier pace, his conscience assuaged.
7. The little bird gradually regained consciousness and celebrated its return to lifewith a song.
8. Meanwhile, up in the hills, a timber wolf who hadn’t eaten for a month heard the little bird’s song.
9. The wolf loped down the hill, scooped the bird out from the dung and ate it.
Here endeth the parable.
The Morals of the Tale
The guy who gets you into the
is not necessarily your enemy. The guy who gets you out of the
is not necessarily your friend. When you’re up to your neck in
don’t sing about it.
As with most parables, this one has three morals:
Flaws Generate Risks of Error
Error of execution (Performance Risk)
inability to sustain the performance of the capabilities one requires to provide the service. Error of planning (Composition Risk)
inability to ensure the validity of one’s approach to composing capabilities in order to deliver the service. Error of intention (Implementation Risk)
inability to guarantee that the service will satisfy the client’s need when deployed in her context-of-use.
But in addition to its morals, this parable also illustrates three classes of risk to which the anticipatory enterprise is exposed, and the three kinds of error that these risks engender.
Asymmetric Demand
Symmetric Demand
the market is defined in terms of what the supplier can provide
supplier assumes that demand is independent of clients’ contexts-of-use.
strategic stance is positional, client is a customer,
service is a commodity, power is held at the centre,
implementation risk is ignored
Has successfully provided a vast variety of commoditised, cheap, globally accessible, networked services, but leads clients to expect services specific to their context-of-use.
Asymmetric demand
demand is defined in relation to the client’s context-of-use
forces the supplier to
adopt relational strategies,
take power to the edge, where multiple contexts-of-use are authorised and make the enterprises agile enough to satisfy the variety of demand.
When suppliers assume that demand is symmetric — independent of the client’s context-of-use as an embodied individual — the client becomes a customer and competitive intensity tends to increase as more suppliers enter markets through the effects of globalisation. Demand asymmetry tends to increase precisely because suppliers’ success in satisfying symmetric demand leads clients to expect ever more value for money with respect to their specific contexts-of-use. As value deficits grow and demand becomes increasingly asymmetric, strategy is under pressure to become relational. This requires a shift in the place where power is held in the enterprise, from the centre, in the form of a positional strategy for the enterprise as a whole, towards the edge, where there is relational knowledge of clients' contexts-of-use. As a result, the focus of the enterprise has to move towards managing the risks associated with agility, the deployment of multiple strategies, each particular to a client relationship.
Collaborative Composition
directed
integration collaborative
composition build and
parameterise single multiple
(system of systems) multiple single organisation of supply
model of how-it-works organisation of demand
model of
use-in-context PAN’s triple articulation provides the means of evaluating the risks encountered in taking power to the edge. build to specification asymmetric demand granularity,
stratification and
orchestration of components depend on context-of use
The shift to a relational strategy involves the separation of the organisation of the services, which are more or less over-determined by the causal nature of the processes from which they are constructed (the model of how-it-works), from the organisation of demand, which introduces constraints relating to the client’s particular context-of-use (the model of use-in-context). In the left column, there is a single model of how the service works, either built for a particular use-in-context (bottom-left), or parameterised so that it can be adapted to multiple forms of use (top-left). On the right, however, there is no single model, but multiple components, each with its own model, composable with other models, to form a System of Systems. In the single use-in-context, a designer can impose, externally, a composition on these components (bottom-right), in which the component systems maintain an ability to operate independently, but their normal operational mode is subordinated to the usage requirements. This directed approach is typically used in large, complex System-of-Systems projects. However, the presumption of a symmetrical relation to demand, arising from the a priori construction of the service, cannot be maintained in the top-right quadrant. There composition has to be a dynamic response to the user’s asymmetric demand and we need to define components with a granularity and stratification that can support the requisite variety of uses-in-context. Granularity refers to...
The Existential Articulation
ontology of supply
a relational model of the actor's knowledge of how her world behaves
in terms of: processes: closed systems that, as material causes, change (public) states-of-affairs
events: states-of-affairs that are observed to pertain after a process
coordinations: collections of processes (and/or coordinations, recursively) that are observed to occur together in some purposeful way.
The actor’s models of her world may be be erroneous or internally inconsistent, are altered as the actor gains knowledge, but are never complete.
This model is constructed from an exo perspective, standing outside of it and able to envisage its behaviour with its causality reversed, tracing events back to their formal causes, which become ‘deeper’ as one descends the existential articulation.
The Deontic Articulation
outcomes: observable states-of-affairs;
transformations: mechanisms that alter outcomes; and
synchronisations: collections of outcomes (and/or synchronisations, recursively) that may be made to occur together. ontology of intent
a relational model of the actor’s ontology of controllability
in terms of
To account for the effects on herself of processes in her world, the actor must construct a model of her world from the endo perspective, that is, with herself in it.
From this perspective, although she experiences as irreversible the occurrence of states-of-affairs, she may nevertheless know that the synchronisation of certain of these occurrences may be reliably controlled.
Existential Deontic
The existential and deontic articulations are composed by asserting mappings that implicate existential events in deontic outcomes. This composite articulation denotes
the repertoire of behaviour paths known to the actor —
the space in which she, as efficient cause, can construct and execute plans.
Which plans she chooses will depend on
how she values their implicated behaviour paths and outcomes.
The existential models each process as a 'closed system', that interacts only through the events to which it is directly related.
Due to the incompleteness of the existential, open system phenomena, such as feature interaction and emergent behaviour, are necessarily lacking from this composite articulation.
The Referential Articulation
ontology of demand
a relational model of the actor's ontology of herself as an anticipatory system
in terms of drivers, which attribute value to the actor's experience (by being, more or less, 'satisfied' by paths-of-behaviour);
demand situations, states-of-affairs whose coming to pass is anticipated to be of value with respect to certain drivers; and
value ladders, in which the experience of collections (recursively) of certain demand situations is anticipated to be of value with respect to certain other drivers.
To give an account of her choosing, we must construct a model, not of the material world, but of the embodied individual as 'final cause'. This (exo) account is of the actor's anticipation of the effects in herself — as a particular 'other' — of experiencing certain behaviour paths, and of how her choice among these behaviour paths is entailed by that anticipation. This reversal of the direction of entailment (from 'efficient' to 'final' cause) characterises the 'anticipatory system' [ROS].
The 'higher' one goes up the recursive referential articulation, the more of the actor's being is implicated in the demand situations, and the more complex becomes the actor's valuation of her experienceof them in terms of drivers. Equally, the ‘lower’ one goes down, the ‘simpler’ become the patterns of behaviour entailed by the actor's anticipation of their experience, until the actor becomes indifferent to that experience per se.
As in the other two articulations, the referential may be erroneous or inconsistent and, since the actor's anticipation of her world always 'leaves something to be desired', is necessarily incomplete.
Defining Granularity and Stratification
Each of the six strata is a binary relation, or simplicial complex, expressed at a level of granularity necessary to relate
context-of-use to the underlying use of components composite
triple
articulation Referential Articulation
Ontology of demand Existential Articulation
Ontology of supply Deontic Articulation
Ontology of intent Implementation risk Collaborative
composition Performance risk Composition risk non-commutative
pruning operator Supply
side Demandside 6. context-of-use 5. usage 4. system of
systems 3. system 2. sub-system 1. component
telephone technology_n_transfn local_customer_mgr second_stage_repair_lcm rsu lmsu_mgr regional_repair_mgr call_centres_director team_manager call_centre_mgr adviser btexact platform_engineer ce_engineer S1 S6 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 q k Landscapes Absence of congruence
between the landscapes
indicates exposure to risk
(in this case, composition) 4 system-of-systems services strategies simplices vertices extended
Q-analysis any pair of adjacent simplicial complexes system 3 outcomes In this case
a ‘peak’ represents linkages between constituent services each subjected to produces a pair of landscapes simplices
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