Cooperative Knowledge Processing: The Key Technology for Future Organizations

Stefan Kirn
1995 International Journal of Intelligent Systems in Accounting, Finance & Management  
Drawing from the challenges organizations are faced with today, there is a growing understanding that future market success, and long-term survival of enterprises will increasingly be related to the effectiveness of information technology utilization. This, however, requires to intertwine much more seriously organizational theory and research in information processing as it has been done before. Within this paper, we approached this aim from the perspective of radically decentralized,
more » ... ed enterprises. We further assume that organizations are increasingly processoriented, rather than applying to structuring organizations based on task decomposition and assignment. This scenario reveals that, due to the inherent autonomy of organizational units, the coordination of decentralized organizational activities (workflows, processes) necessitates a cooperative style of problem solving. On this basis, the paper introduces into the research area of cooperative knowledge processing, with a particular focus on multi-agent decision support systems, and human computer cooperative work. Finally, several important organizational applications of cooperative knowledge processing are presented that demonstrate how future enterprises can take great advantage from these new technologies. Organizational Paradigms: Evolving Role of Information Technology Organizational design requires to shape organizational structures so that the resulting body can pursue the aims and objectives formally introduced, negotiated and decided upon by the owners of the organization, its members and participants. Thus, the description, analysis, and explanation of organizations is one of the most important areas in management science. Since long, a diversity of organizational models has been developed, each with a particular focus, and with distinct applicability to theoretical and real-world problems. Out of these, we have selected four models in order to demonstrate how the integration of information technology into organizational research has changed over the past 50 to 70 years. They are: (1) the black box model originating from traditional macroeconomis, (2) the production-oriented organizational model of Gutenberg, (3) the decision-oriented approach to modeling organizations, and (4) the organizational model originating from the Management of the 1990's Research Program which has been conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). While the first two models introduce the historical roots, models (3) and (4) originate from contemporary organizational research that considers information technology a constitutive component of modern organizations. Early Work The black box-model emerged from traditional macroeconomics; it considers organizations single atomic entities. This model is not concerned with why an organization behaves as it does, nor does it relate internal structures and activities of an enterprise to its success on the market. Thus, there is no need and even no means to investigate how organizational information processing should be operated in order to improve the behavior of an enterprise, or to contribute to the integration of the organization with its environment. The production-oriented model has been developed as a part of Gutenberg's production theory (Gutenberg, 1951) . Gutenberg distinguished two subsystems of an enterprise, namely the physical subsystem (that is, the physical place of production) and the administrative subsystem that involves decision making, planning, organization, and the management of information. In that view, enterprises have an organization. Organization is the tool by which the results of planning can be set in place. The important contribution of Gutenberg was to reveal that the internal organizational structure affects the outcome of production. However, his model involves two important shortcomings: production workers are considered as machine-like components of manufacturing systems, a concept that draws from the theory of scientific management (Taylor, 1919) . Further, the model does not investigate how the management and processing of information can actively contribute to organizational aims and objectives.
doi:10.1002/j.1099-1174.1995.tb00094.x fatcat:5oc5de5h5nbibgxjc6b2yxwhda