Wanted to let you know of the latest burst of punctuated equilibrium in one ICEIMT-related evolutionary thread.
Many of you will recall the origin of the ICEIMT work: The Suppliers' Working Group at $40M had developed some precompetitive insights into the nature of the EI problem and what would be supportable given the confluence of marketing forces and the then state of technology. A major industry-government initiative was envisioned, to be cosponsored by the US and ESPRIT.
MCC was hired as facilitator for the first phase, and the ICEIMT process was supported with two goals in mind: to make public the SWG results and to set the technical agenda for the new megaprogram. The results of ICEIMT were captured in the MIT Press book, which still serves as a useful reference. Five years later (this time on Europe's initiative), a second ICEIMT process updated the technical agenda, reported in the Springer ICEIMT book.
The thread of interest here concerns what was called the dynamic "Federation Mechanism" in the first ICEIMT. In the revisiting, this was greatly expanded with now much better technical insight; higher levels of EI in the capability model that deal with emergent systems and soft models.
The large collaborative program never got off the ground with Europe for uninteresting reasons. In the US, the funding that the Hill had planned for this effort got "repurposed" for Agile Manufacturing. Under that program, we continued the SWG/ICEIMT agenda which focused on a requirement for introspective models, models of the modeling domain and its components in the enterprise. It is believed that advances in this area will empower soft models (modeling the unknown, tacit knowledge, and social/cultural dynamics) and a new class of enterprise metrics which can deal with relative dynamism.
The project is now complete, having finished under private sponsorship, and the report is available as a book: The Agile Virtual Enterprise: Cases, Metrics, Tools.
We have set up an information page that has the Table of Contents, Index and reviewer comments at:
<http://www.sirius-beta.com/bookinfo.html>
or you can go directly to Amazon at
<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1567202640/siriusbeta>
Best, Ted _____________ Ted Goranson Sirius-Beta, Virginia Beach USA 757/426-6704 http://www.sirius-beta.com
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