Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Beer imagined and was prepared to implement something less than this in
his models. He understood them as sets of mathematical equations linking
long lists of variables such as demand, revenue, technological and economic
change, dividends, share prices, and the money market. And the basic form
of these sets of equations was not, in itself, revisable, at least as part of Beer's
description of the regular functioning of a viable system. What could be re-
vised in practice were the parameters figuring in these equations which speci-
fied the intensity of the couplings between variables. Beer's models were thus
adaptive, but only to a degree, within a fixed overall form.
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One further point. The symbolic models of the VSM were envisaged as
conventional simulations programmed on digital computers. In this respect,
there was no distinctively cybernetic aspect to the VSM. But it is still instruc-
tive to review Beer's thoughts on the computerization of industry. It is im-
portant to note that Beer was himself an enthusiast for computers. As early
as 1956 at United Steel he had had installed one of the first computers in the
world to be dedicated to management science, a Ferranti Pegasus (Harnden
and Leonard 1994, 4). He was nevertheless a consistent critic of the way in
which computers were being introduced more generally into industry and
business. His argument was that “the first and great mistake” was that “people
set out to automate the procedures and therefore the organisations they al-
ready knew. These themselves were frozen out of history and fixed by profes-
sionalism.” Computers were, in other words, being used to automate existing
clerical tasks while leaving the overall structure of the traditional organization
untouched: “Companies have exchanged new lamps for old, and set them in
the window as marks of progress. . . . We are using a powerful control instru-
ment competent to reorganise the firm, its departments and functions, and
encapsulating it in a received system geared to the quill pen.” Instead, Beer
argued, we should ask, “What should my enterprise be like, now that comput-
ers exist?” (Beer 1967, 214-17).
Beer was especially critical of the use of computers in business to automate
and augment record keeping, and this gets us back to the ontological question.
If the world is beyond our capacity to know it, and if, even worse, it continu-
ally changes, knowing the past is of limited utility. Our information process-
ing should therefore be forward looking, as in the system 4 model of the VSM.
“It is worth making a tremendous effort to burst through the barrier marked
'now,' and to make managers concern themselves with what
can
be man-
aged—namely the future, however near—rather than peruse a record of what
can be managed no longer—namely the past, however recent. We may learn
from that past record of course, but we cannot influence it in retrospect. . . .
