The article "Simply Complex"
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by John Casti
defines the "fingerprints" of complexity and analyzes two computer models of complex behavior.
The economic and social world we inhabit is characterized by ever more rapid change, driven in particular by innovations in the means by which information is generated, stored, managed and communicated. In many of today's businesses, top managers understand very well the products they make and what their customers want, but they often have less understanding of the changes that are taking place in the structures of markets and productive processes due to new information- and communication- technology. We want to work with our clients to understand the new information-age world: how it functions; how individuals and organizations may act effectively within it.
Critical concepts for understanding worlds of perpetual novelty have been developed in the past several years in the new sciences of complexity. Complexity sciences study how higher-level patterns and structures can emerge from the interactions among a set of lower-level agents. These studies have led to new insights about organization, strategy, and effective action in situations in which key aspects of the future are impossible to imagine, much less forecast with any accuracy. They have also led to the development of techniques for computer-based simulation that both illustrate and illuminate processes of learning, adaptation and self-organization.
The problem now is to learn how to master the flow of information, and how to interpret what it all means. This requires a much more active approach to data management. Techniques have been developed over the past decade to extract key patterns from massive data flows. These techniques have now been applied to many areas in which massive data flows are being mined for profit and risk reduction - delinquency predictions in credit cards, fraud detection, price forecasting, chemical plant control, automobile control, drowsy driver detection, and many more.
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Complication in business is the large variety of "things"
in a business that need to be managed: |
The nature of complexity is the sometimes surprising consequences arising from relationships and interactions: |
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The challenge is to combine the complication of traditional business with modern complexity science to capture the feel of the modern information-age marketplace.
