Systems Department Number: 002 Date: 08 01 2002 Author: Intag Source: Intag   Systems Thinking   INTAG is an IT and Communications R&D firm, particularly focused on Internet applications. Its background go backwards to Systems Theory and Mathematics Models, working within a field known as Systems Thinking, in the track of the MIT Professor Jay Forrester ideas and the last developments about Systems theory and applications made in the American Universities of MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Stanford. Recommended Sources System Dynamics, Systems Meditation, Systemic Archetypes, MIT Systems Dynamics, Learning Organizations, Whole Systems Design Association, Cybernetics and System Theory, Thinking Systems. General Considerations In a world that advances technologically at a terrific pace and particularly within the realm of Internet, the indiscriminate and hurried application of complex technologies had turned it into chaos along the last decade. Many sites look like some "Pop Art" works, an aggregate of pieces of hardware and software without any coherent basic basement architecture, resulting in a weak architecture with a dreadful engineer structure. This phenomenon is the major cause of the proliferation of inefficient, unstable, insecure and feeble solutions, which as houses of cards toppling over at the slightest blow. In the Web proliferate myriad of search engines, hubs and directories that are not well suited to offer what general users need. With databases happens quite the same, difficulty to search what general users need and lack of flexibility, which in its turn reduce too much the useful life of them. As long as the IT utopia of the 70's, Integrated Solutions for big enterprises seem to be more distant than ever. Classical applications are implemented as gross aggregates of hardware and software that almost nobody understands. To this chaotic scenario we must add the growing specialization in all the industries, where you can not find "generalists", that rare and hard to form people able to distinguish the tree from the wood. We may find dramatic examples of this shortness of global talent in any field of our life, from corporate to health and human welfare. At the corporate level we are seeing the recent accounting scandals where none was able to detect vital failures of the actual accounting and auditing systems. Nobody was prepared to see the collapsing process but to be honest, the accounting systems were neither adequate to go upwards precisely from the detail to global corporate figures nor to go downwards from global assumptions to basement needs. The same happens in the health field with top professional mastering micro disciplines and virtual absence of wise Medical Clinic experts. You may find approved medicines and procedures to improve one "black box" of our organism but seriously deteriorating the whole, for instance, to improve the Volume of Absorbed Oxygen in order to improve the athletic performance but producing a chain of mismatches in our whole organism driving athletes to collapse and even to death. INTAG joins together an "old" systemic experience with a deep knowledge of the most advanced technologies but having present in mind that even the most advanced technologies cannot cope with the problems generated by malformed basic structures. The engineering experience for instance tell us that the cost of the basic structure of a building involves no more than 5% of the total cost, but if malformed or weak the resting 95% could not add value to the building, being at last a vicious building with structural failures, sometimes hidden. Concerning Internet, XML, Java, OLE and all the formidable design tools we have at hand are useless and misleading if the hardware, software and communications structures are integrated in a "structurally weak architecture".