Crucial Consequences of Un-Holistic Business Information - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 358

Table 1. The selected level of holism and realism of consideration of the selected topic between the
fictitious, requisite, and total holism and realism of approach and wholeness of insights, actions, and
other outcomes

←--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------→
Fictitious holism/realism (inside a single
viewpoint)

Requisite holism/realism (a dialectical system of all
essential viewpoints)

Total = real holism/realism (a system of
all viewpoints)

Dangerous due to causing one-sided
oversights along with partial insights
based on specialization

Attainable, but depending on human choice of the
essential viewpoints/professions from all possible,
and their synergies

Ideal, but impossible to attain due to huge
complexity of reality reaching beyond hu-
man capability

WhoLeness of inforMAtion
support for business
operAtions

“make-and-sell”, to “sense-and-respond”, toward
“anticipate-and-learn” (Afuah, 1998; Cohen,
2002; Barabba, 2004; Bernson, Standing, 2008).
The new situation requires a new approach - “state
of mind” that balances creativity and intuition
with analytics and science (Afuah, 1998; Gunton,
1998; Brown, Duguid, 2000; Verma, Kapur, 2006;
Curtis, Cobham, 2008).
Information management innovation is
needed, and (requisitely) holistic thinking must
be its background. The problem of the theory and
practice of business informatics has lied in the tar-
get orientation aimed at requisite business infor-
mation (Gunton, 1998; Anderson, 2000; Harmon,
2003; Laudon et al., 2007; Potocan, 2008). And in
attempts to increase holism of information, we are
facing two basic problems of data suitability, e.g.
what is adequately target-oriented information ;
and how to create (and define) a suitable level of
generalization of information, resulting from data
and messages , in order to avoid errors .
We hence try to research more deeply errors in
information systems and add to discussion about
reliability three pointed-out topics: reality and
captured data are not the same, decision-making
takes place within a context, and only selected
data are processed. We also try to contribute to
discussion by thinking how can one tackle the
data-to-information-to-decision process in order
to diminish the number and weight of errors.
Data recording errors follow earlier errors - data
selection, and data selection basis and errors in it.

the concept of requisite
holism and Wholeness

Holism of human behavior has never been attain-
able, neither is wholeness of its outcomes if the
word is taken completely literally like it is put in
dictionaries: in them it includes every attribute,
all attributes, and nothing (!) is left aside. All (!)
professions (which tend to be several thousand)
would have to be included. And this cannot be
done. That's why Mulej and Kajzer introduced
the law of requisite holism (Mulej, 1974; Mulej,
Kajzer, 1998; Mulej et al, 2000; Mulej et al.,
2003; Mulej et al., 2005; Mulej, 2007) to make the
Mulej's concept of the Dialectical System (DS)
clear and acceptable. It expresses the experience
that one has the unavoidable habit to select the DS
as a synergetic network of all crucial viewpoints
to be considered, and to leave the others aside,
or to reduce even more. Reductionism is both
unavoidable and dangerous. See Table 1.
Selection of the crucial viewpoints and ne-
glecting of other viewpoints of consideration is
due to the decision-makers and their attributes as
their subjective starting points that include—in
synergy—both knowledge and emotions. The
latter are expressed as values and may become
culture, ethics, and norms.