Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Look straight ahead down the motorway when you are driving flat out. Most
enterprises are directed with the driver's eyes fixed on the rear-view mirror”
(1981, 127, 199). Beer's idea in the VSM was thus that most of the informa-
tion that one can collect on an organization is useless and can be discarded.
This was what the filtering operations at the various levels did, keeping only
anomalous signals for transmission to higher levels.
Seen from this angle, the object of the VSM was to reorganize the firm
around the computer—to effect a transformation that was social as well as
technological, to rearrange the human components as part of an adaptive
technosocial system of information flows and transformations. Here, too,
then, social relations and ontology hung together. And this contrast between
the VSM and the traditional structure of the organization is another nice ex-
ample of how ontology can make a difference in practice. Further aspects of
this are apparent below.
The VSM in Practice
The VSM was a normative vision of the organization. Organizations had
to look like the VSM if they were to survive and grow in time. The obvious
implication of that would seem to be that they needed to be remade from the
ground up to exemplify the VSM. Beer had one serious chance at that, which
is reviewed in the next section. But Beer could hardly claim that all existing
organizations were nonviable—some of them had been around for a long
time, the Catholic Church, for example. He therefore made a more nuanced
argument. Just like organisms, organizations could be more or less viable—
some struggling to survive, others actually dying, others springing happily
into the future: “The amoeba succeeded, the dinosaur failed, the coelacanth
muddles along” (Beer 1981, 239). And the problem was that organizations had
no way to discuss this temporal viability; they lacked any language or concep-
tual apparatus for it.
What organizations had instead was organization charts of hierarchical
power relationships running downward from the board of directors through
vertical chains of command devoted to production, accounting, marketing,
and so on. Beer's claim was that such charts did not, and could not, repre-
sent how firms actually worked. They functioned, at most, as devices for ap-
portioning blame when things went wrong.
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Already, then, whether anyone
recognized it or not, the VSM was a better description of how the firm really
worked, and Beer's pitch was that the formal VSM could therefore function
as a diagnostic tool (1981, 155). One could examine the firm, or any other
