A system is a term used to refer to a collection of processes brought together to perform a task. There are systems all around us, in science and in nature, both naturally and artificially created. As broad of a definition as it may sound, systems come in an exremely wide variety of types and are applied to nearly everything imaginable.
Since systems encompass such a vast amount of things and seem to be endlessly interconnected with one another. “Rather than reducing an entity (e.g. the human body) to the properties of its parts or elements (e.g. organs or cells), systems theory focuses on the arrangement of and relations between the parts which connect them into a whole (cf. holism).[1]” What this means is that instead of getting tied up in the seemingly endless amount of individual entities that make up a system, system theory tries to focus on their relationships from a broad perspective. This gives is a distinction to ‘system theory’ when compared to just using the term “system”.
“A system, as a unit of analysis, may be both part of a whole (a component of subsystem) and the whole for a set of lower level components.”[2] A simple yet robust example of a system is the human digestive system. This essentially Inputs food, Processes it by extracting nutrients and breaking down the waste, and outputs the useful and wasteful components. The digestive system even provides feedback by letting us know if it is working properly via the central nervous system. It is fascinating that an analogy can be built by something inside of our own bodies to explain the same processes that are found in information systems.
Of course there are the more technology and information based systems more the central focus of this class, which are generally man-made. There are hardware, software, or organizational systems that people have created to efficiently accomplish a task. One thing that I did not realize coming into this course was how it information systems correlate to systems found in nature. It seems that nature itself and the human condition when confronted with a task is to apply a system to it and perpetually evolve the systems efficiency to provide a better output. This can be evident in nature via the Developmental Systems Theory, which is a framework for understanding how humans evolve as a species, which argues that human species as whole follow the four same stages of development that individuals follow: codependence, counterdependence, independence and interdependence. Similar to the stages of an information system, and all other systems, “each stage contains essential developmental processes that must be completed in order for an individual, couple, family, group, organization or nation-state to move on to the next stage. The most critical factor in our model is making sure that children are able to complete these processes on time and in a healthy family environment. Then they are able to move forward in their development.” [3]
[2] Organization - communication. 5. The renaissance in systems thinking http://books.google.com/books?id=q3JYZmgk0UgC&pg=PA7&lpg=PA7&dq=system+theory+subsystems+digestive&source=bl&ots=xUiv35VcGO&sig=4ciHXD3K7zV5p5MAvkdJ7Qk2muQ&hl=en&sa=X&ei=UVDkUbaoDta-4AOnmoG4Bg&ved=0CFUQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=system%20theory%20subsystems%20digestive&f=false (Google eBook)
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