Information Evolution and Organisations

Abstract

In a changing digital world, organisations need to be effective information processing entities, in which people, processes, and technology together gather, process, and deliver the information that the organisation needs. However, like other information processing entities, organisations are subject to the limitations of information evolution. These limitations are caused by the combinatorial challenges associated with information processing, and by the trade-offs and shortcuts driven by selection pressures. This paper applies the principles of information evolution to organisations and uses them to derive principles about organisation design and organisation change. This analysis shows that information evolution can illuminate some of the seemingly intractable difficulties of organisations, including the effects of organisational silos and the difficulty of organisational change. The derived principles align with and connect different strands of current organisational thinking. In addition, they provide a framework for creating analytical tools to create more detailed organisational insights.Adapting to the environment is also very widely discussed. It is at the heart of natural selection [14], but, more recently, it has been embraced in many fields. Is his analysis of culture, Schein said that [15] "the culture of a group can be defined as the accumulated shared learning of that group as it solves its problems of external adaptation and internal integration." Quine [16] discusses the "field of force whose boundary conditions are experience." In [17], Christian says that "natural selection [has] equipped large organisms with a desire for more information, because good information [is] vital to their success.[...] Decision-making works at several different levels in brainy creatures. Some decisions need to be made quickly..." As this quote implies, adapting to the environment requires trade-offs. Simon [18] uses this idea in his concept of bounded rationality. As described in [13], this is "the theory that when people make decisions, their rationality is limited (bounded) by the difficulty of the decision problem, their own cognitive limitations, and the time available to make the decision." Simon invented the term "satisficing" to embrace the concept of doing what is good enough. Many authors, starting with Ferrero [19], and then Zipf [20], have captured a related idea, namely, the "principle of least effort", especially as it concerns searching for information.Section 2 summarises some of the key ideas about information evolution. More detail, derived from [6,7], is provided in Appendix A, which explores the underlying concepts and explains the diagramming conventions.Based on these ideas, Section 3 develops a connection-related model of information processing that shows how information evolution applies to organisations. One of the themes throughout the paper is that the way in which information is structured constrains how it can be used. This means that we need to think carefully about the model and ensure ...

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“…Monitoring is a key element for the construction of the organization; thus, all these aspects should be monitored frequently to check that they are well developing and to identify gaps. According to Walton [41], in a changing environment, change needs to be built into the business-as-usual business architecture and culture, and a change ecosystem must be developed. This effective change needs repetition and continuous attention, or else the memory of the change connection will decay and the similarity of future success with change will diminish [41].…”

“…According to Walton [41], in a changing environment, change needs to be built into the business-as-usual business architecture and culture, and a change ecosystem must be developed. This effective change needs repetition and continuous attention, or else the memory of the change connection will decay and the similarity of future success with change will diminish [41].…”

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