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Day One (Tuesday November 25, 2008) 10:00 am - 10:45 am
Prof. Brian Wilson Brian Wilson has a background in nuclear power engineering and control system design. In 1966 he became a founding member of the Department of Systems Engineering at the University of Lancaster, where he pursued the application of control principles to management problem solving. There he was involved in the development and use of Human Activity Systems and 'verbs in the imperative' in place of mathematics as the modeling language for the intellectual processes involved and maintained particular interest in the application of Soft Systems Methodology to information and organisation-based analysis. This research was published as his first book in 'Systems: Concepts, Methodologies and Applications'. In 1992 he founded his own consulting company, Brian Wilson & Associates, where he continued to develop and apply his unique brand of SSM. Not only did he lay the foundation for the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) standard Managing Successful Programmes (MSP), his work has also resulted in his second book 'SSM Conceptual Model Building And Its Contribution'. He has been involved with a number of organisations in both the private and public sector. Most recently, his involvement has been with macro issues and the transformational government agenda for central and local government organisations, including NHS, Children Services and the Police. Business and Information All businesses and all organisations exhibit characteristics, which make their descriptions and methods of analysis particularly difficult. This presentation describes, very briefly, these characteristics, since they have a significant impact on the specific approach to linking information to business, which is described here. The approach, which is known as SSM, (Soft Systems Methodology), was originally derived through an "Action Research" programme, started around 30 years ago and is continually refined and updated by a number of practitioners, through current consulting work in a large variety of organisations in both the public and private sector. The approach demands two distinctions in particular; Firstly a distinction between "the real world" of organisational structures and operations and the construction of an intellectual concept which drives the thinking about those structures and operations. The second distinction is between "WHAT" an organisation does and "HOW" it does it. Armed with these ideas a "defensible" construct is derived, which is taken to be an explicit description of what the organisation needs to be doing to achieve some consensus view of it's vision/mission and/or objectives. The assumption is then made that "Information" is required as a support for the processes and hence the construct can be used to derive the specific "Information requirements" needed to support the business in total or a chosen segment of the business. This statement of requirements is independent of any organisation structures and is, hence, robust to role and role incumbent changes. A comparison is then made of these specified requirements against current provision to identify gaps, overlaps, duplications, incoherences etc. Thus, since the information requirements are derived from a construct representing the business, the necessary linking between business and information is inherent in the process of analysis. The approach will be illustrated by actual examples of application taken from recent project work. |
 Prof. Brian Wilson  |