Word of the Day: systems thinking

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Title: Word of the Day

February 07, 2005 Published by  WhatIs.com Word of the Day LOOK IT UP     LEARNING CENTER     FAST REFERENCES     CAREERS         Issue Sponsored By:   >  Voice over IP Newsletter IN THIS ISSUE:   >  Word of the Day: systems thinking   >  Today's Tech News   >  Brain Food   >  Additions and Updates     Voice over IP Newsletter Get breaking enterprise voice industry news and tips from VoIP experts delivered directly to your inbox from SearchEnterpriseVoice.com. The VoIP Newsletter reports on the latest happenings with major vendors, industry trends and provides technical advice from leading voice communication technology experts. Update your profile and subscribe today.     systems thinking Systems thinking is a holistic approach to analysis that focuses on the way that a system's constituent parts interrelate and how systems work over time and within the context of larger systems. Systems thinking originated in 1956, when Professor Jay Forrester founded the Systems Dynamic Group at MIT's Sloan School of Management. The systems thinking approach contrasts with traditional analysis, which studies systems by breaking them down into their separate elements. According to systems thinking, system behavior results from the effects of reinforcing and balancing processes. A reinforcing process leads to the increase of some system component. If reinforcement is unchecked by a balancing process, it eventually leads to collapse. A balancing process is one that tends to maintain equilibrium in a particular system. Attention to feedback is an essential component of system thinking. For example, in project management, prevailing wisdom may prescribe the addition of workers to a project that is lagging. However, in practice, that tactic might have actually slowed development in the past. Attention to that relevant feedback can allow management to look for other solutions rather than wasting resources on an approach that has been demonstrated to be counterproductive. Systems thinking can be used in any area of research and has been applied to the study of medical, environmental, political, economic, human resources, and educational systems, among many others. Systems thinking uses computer simulation and a variety of diagrams and graphs to model, illustrate, and predict system behavior. Among the systems thinking tools are: the behavior over time (BOT) graph, which indicates the actions of one or more variables over a period of time; the causal loop diagram (CLD), which illustrates the relationships between system elements; the management flight simulator, which uses an interactive program to simulate the effects of management decisions; and the simulation model, which simulates the interaction of system elements over time. MORE INFO: > The Thinking Page maintains pages devoted to "Systems Thinking." > Pegasus Communications also includes a section about systems thinking. > SearchCRM.com offers a collection of Best Web Links about "Business Intelligence and Data Analysis." Sports Illustrated scores with clustered storage [SearchStorage.com] At this Sunday's Super Bowl, Sports Illustrated is using a clustered storage system to store and retrieve the 16,000 digital photos to be taken during the game. Gates signals a switch in Microsoft's philosophy [SearchWin2000.com] Despite taking a swipe at open source, Microsoft's co-founder is no longer pressing customers to go Microsoft-only, according to an analyst who dissected a public e-mail message from Bill Gates on software interoperability. Expect 13 Windows patches, some critical [SearchSecurity.com] Microsoft will release patches Tuesday to fix critical security holes in Windows Media Player, MSN Messenger, Microsoft Office and Visual Studio. 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