Representing Organizational Conservation of Information - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 138

Table 1. Notional Gaussian distributions with their standard deviations, their Fourier transforms with
their standard deviations, and Fourier pairs for both. Notice in all cases that the Fourier pairs are
greater than ½

Function σ f Fourier Transform σ F σ f σ F

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.33

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5.01 1.67

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.94

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2.51 2.36

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2.66

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1.25 3.33

Citizens Advisory Board (CAB) where compro-
mises can be easily blocked, compromises made
by the majority-ruled Savannah River Site (SRS)
CAB have accelerated environmental remediation
at SRS (Lawless et al., 2008).
Per Bohr (1955), complementarity actors and
observers and incommensurable cultures generate
conjugate or bistable information couples that
he and Heisenberg (1958) suggested paralleled
the uncertainty principle at the atomic level. We
have built a model to test their speculation and to
extend it to role conflicts (Lawless et al., 2009).
But even for mundane social interactions, Carley
(2002) concluded that humans became social to
reduce uncertainty. Thus, the information avail-
able to any human is incomplete, producing
uncertainty. More importantly, this uncertainty
has a minimum irreducibility that promotes the
existence of tradeoffs between any two factors in
an interaction (uncertainty in worldviews, stories
or business models, ∆WV , and their execution, ∆v ;
uncertainty in centers of gravity ∆x COG and spatial
frequencies, ∆k ; and uncertainty in energy, ∆E ,
and time, ∆t ).
The uncertainty in these oscillations can be
reformulated 3 to establish that Fourier pairs,

consisting of standard deviations, are equal to:

σ A σ B > ½ (2)

Equation (2) indicates that as variance in fac-
tor A broadens, variance in factor B narrows, and
vice versa for Fourier pairs. This effect is illus-
trated using notional data to build three Gaussian
distributions with increasing standard deviations
as shown in Table 1. Notice that as the standard
deviations ( σ f ) for the primary functions increase,
the standard deviations for their Fourier transforms
decrease ( σ F ), a simple illustration of COI. Also
notice that the relationship for the Fourier pairs
( σ f σ F ) reflected in Equation (2) hold in all of the
cases illustrated. And as long as we are dealing
with Gaussian distributions, this result must hold
(for a proof in signal detection theory, see Cohen,
1995; also, see Rieffel, 2007).
To summarize, a model of interdependence in
the interaction of organizations must be able to:

1. Reflect orthogonal perspectives; e.g., be-
tween prosecutors and defense attorneys
(Busemeyer, 2009); between actions and
observations or between multiple cultures