_______________ COR-List Digest 28 April 1994 Issue Number 001
Topics: Announcing The Computational Organization Research (COR) List
Administrivia: Please send submissions to "COR-List@treska.usc.edu". Send other requests, such as requests to subscribe or changes in your e-mail address, to "COR-List-Request@treska.usc.edu". ================================================================
ANNOUNCING THE COMPUTATIONAL ORGANIZATION RESEARCH (COR) LIST
Computational Research in Organization Theory, Analysis, and Design Theory, Analysis, and Design of Computational Organizations
AIMS: -----
COR-List exists to publish news items; requests for assistance; research lab reports; journal, conference and meeting announcements; position notices; events calendars; comments on publications; paper abstracts; and other items of interest in the area of Computational Organization Research.
BACKGROUND ----------
A growing collection of communities worldwide is now actively researching organizational phenomena using computational methods. There are pressing research issues in organization theory and organization development that are highly amenable to solution by computational modeling, theorizing, and experimentation. Computational methods may provide several advantages for studying some organizational phenomena:
Organization theory, analysis, and design problems can be hard partly because of scale and complexity. By analogy, there have been several recent initiatives on topics of modeling, analysis and simulation of large-scale physical and biological phenomena, such as airflow and the human genome, to better understand underlying structures and to solve particular configuration problems. The structural and configuration problems of organizations are equally impactful and scientifically challenging.
For the study of organizational issues, the theory, modeling technology, and infrastructure is ready, and the impacts of improved effectiveness and flexibility of organizations could be great.
Networks and concurrent-system technologies have made possible wide-area interactions, virtual organizations, and controllable interactive agents.
Representation, and implementation technologies and theory have advanced to the point where we now have insightful and useful tools for theorizing about and modeling organization-level phenomena. These include coordination languages and algorithms, organization ontologies, computational organization theories, etc.
Advances in computer aided design have also created useful tools that begin to bring computer aided organization design into reach. Computational modeling and evaluation of organization, mentioned here, supports progress on computational organization design. Techniques of optimization, qualitative reasoning, iteration and search, developed for other applications, also support computational organization design.
High-powered desktop computing creates demand for generally-available tools for organization monitoring, analysis and design. These computers, along with very fast high-performance simulation capabilities on supercomputers, add the capability to do complex analyses with reasonable response times.
The infrastructure that exists for such research comprises existing working collaborations among key groups, as well as transferable analytical and modeling software (e.g. experimental testbeds, declarative theories, sharable ontologies, coordination languages and algorithms, etc.).
The time is ripe to draw together the community and begin to establish forums for discussion and dissemination of information about activities and research. Computational systems for complex organization analysis do exist, and are in actual application or pilot use in major organizations, e.g. for organizational design, analysis, re-configuration, re-engineering, and process change. In addition, large research grants have been made to a number of research centers to study organization problems computationally. It has become clear through a set of recent meetings and publications that enough of an interdisciplinary organization-studies community has emerged, with enough familiarity with each others' work and enough basic interdisciplinary knowledge to make real inroads. As a followup to these recent meetings and to growing interest, and after discussion with a number of people and groups, the COR-List has been founded.
INTENDED FOCUS --------------
The intended focus of this list is captured in its name: Computational Organization Research. General guidelines might be:
COMPUTATIONAL: The list is concerned with disseminating information about explicitly computational approaches to organizational phenomena. Example areas might include computational models and representations of organizational knowledge, explicit organizational ontologies, simulations of organizational activity or structuring, computational approaches to building organization theories, coordination algorithms, computational approaches to organization design, computational tools for organization analysis, and and the study of "computational organizations"---those organizations made up completely or partly of computational participants.
ORGANIZATION: The list is intended to focus on mid-range, organization-level phenomena--as versus theories of individual participants (e.g. cognition or psychology) or macro-scale phenomena (macroeconomic behavior, societal-level dynamics). This line is hard to draw, however, and macro-mezzo-micro links are of explicit interest, as are implications for agent-oriented and societal-level phenomena.
RESEARCH: The bias of this list is primarily toward organizational research. It is clear, however, that much good organization research is driven by clear applied problems, and that the best tools embody clear principles and theory. This line, too is hard to draw, and research may include issues in the practical application of organizational tools such as business process reengineering tools or enterprise integration tools.
CURRENT COMMUNITIES -------------------
Several current communities, focus groups, and workshops concerned with various aspects of COR include:
Mathematical Organization Theory [e.g., contact: Richard Burton (Duke) Kathleen Carley (CMU), Michael Cohen (Michigan), Michael Masuch (Amsterdam), Michael Prietula (CMU)]
Distributed AI/Multiagent Systems (DAI/MAS) [E.g., contact: USA: Michael Huhns (MCC), Vic Lesser (UMASS); Europe: Yves Demazeau (LIFIA/Grenoble), Jeff Rosenschein (Hebrew Univ); Pacific Rim: Toru Ishida (Kyoto Univ); Mario Tokoro (Keio Univ)]
Computational Organization Design [E.g., contact: Ingemar Hulthage (USC), Ray Levitt (Stanford)]
RELATED INTERNET RESOURCES --------------------------
There are several other internet lists with related subject-matter but somewhat different focus:
BPR-List: BPR-List focuses specifically on problems and approaches to business process reengineering. [bpr-l@duticai.twi.tudelft.nl]
DAI-List: The DAI-List specifically takes an Artificial Intelligence orientation to artificial multi-agent and distributed problem solving systems. [Moderated by Michael N. Huhns, (dai-list@mcc.com, dai-list-request@mcc.com]
EINET: The EI net mailing list focuses specifically on problems and approaches to Enterprise Integration Technology. [all-iceimt@einet.net]
INFOSYS: INFOSYS covers Information Systems. [Moderated by Dennis W. Viehland (d.viehland@massey.ac.nz. Message listserv@american.edu with "SUBSCRIBE INFOSYS YOURFIRSTNAME YOURLASTNAME".]
OMTNet: Organization & Management Theory Network. The OMT-List's focus is theory, but it is not specialized to explicitly computational approaches. [Moderated by: Dwight Lemke, OMT@vaxa.cis.uwosh.edu; Back issues of the Digest are available via gopher in the Management Archives at the University of Minnesota: chimera.sph.umn.edu.]
SUBSCRIPTIONS -------------
To subscribe to COR-List, send email with your current email address to:
COR-List-Request@treska.usc.edu
Very soon the addresses of COR-List will simplify to
COR-List@usc.edu COR-List-Request@usc.edu
(The treska.usc.edu address will continue to work.)
MODERATORS ----------
Ingemar Hulthage and Les Gasser Computational Organization Design Lab Institute of Safety and Systems Management USC Los Angeles, CA 90089-0021
Phone: (213) 740-4044/4046 Email: {hulthage|gasser}@usc.edu