Virtual Organization, Organizational Intelligence, and Imperfect Information Processing

Abstract

After the loss of Eden, human beings have always faced the difficulties of imperfect information processing. No one knows what shall happen tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. And, people strongly wanted to know the future. At that moment, time is starting toward the future. People have rushed into the real world, in which they were suffering from uncertainty and anxiousness.

First, they had thrown themselves on god’s mercy. They have trusted their primitive nation’s fate and destiny to oracle and prediction in ancient Greek, China and Japan. They offered sacrificial victims to their deities, told their victory and defeat of war, and preyed a fertility of hunting and fruitful crop. Almost simultaneously, people have formed organization to see the far future. They have already known the tactics of war, technology of production, and comfortable life of city.

Organization is, as it were, a castle in the air. Human beings have built it up on the community, before the birth of market, and state. Organization has geometric structure which represents some properties, even though the structure is virtual. The geometric properties generate organizational phenomena and performance.

Organization could have intelligence as well as Human Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence (AI). It has many aspects of intelligence, such as memory, emotion, excellent discernment and inference, and so on. In these characteristics, the core concept of organizational intelligence (OI) is the ability to make a strategic plan for smooth transformation of organizational structure. Adding to it, the core concept consists of setting a goal and predicting organizational future.

Organizational structure has spontaneously grown up and repeated the growing cycle in the birth of enterprise. On the other hand, in any political systems, social systems, and management systems there has continued long-term wave of transformation of organizational structure, only according to technologically growing curve, without intention of organizational intelligence. We can observe that the structure is swinging between hierarchy and decentralized structure.

Organizational intelligence is defined as to make a strategy, describe structural design, set a goal, and to predict organizational future. It means that organizational intelligence exists on meta layer in the hierarchy of organizational structure and phenomena. The space of organizational intelligence is out of cybernetic space and out of self-organizing space, but in systems space.

In particular, organizational intelligence makes a plan for organizational structure, while observing and considering the spontaneously structural transformation which can bring optimal transition. Thus, while organizational intelligence is monitoring the transition and simulating the optimal structure using AI, it can support promotion of the metamorphose. This scheme may bring us the newer style of management organization with computerized organizational Intelligence.