In the previous post, “Paradigms in Management Automation”, I defined four distinct automation paradigms in the past, current, and possible future. Here, I wanted to explain them further by comparing them to each other with a few criteria:
- Industry trends - hardware and software technologies that were available at time of the paradigm shift
- Business demands - emerging business demands that triggered the paradigm shift
- Automation focus - a primary idea or key guiding principle behind the automation practices
- Dominating architecture - the most common architectural style or framework used to develop the automation practices
- Integration model - a way multiple systems were integrated with each other
- Standards - widely used standards that the automation practices comply to, and
Industry trends | Mainframes, machine codes, assemblers, procedural programming |
Business demands | Store and process large amounts of data in shorter time, share key information among people of organization |
Automation focus | Critical narrow organization-wide problems |
Dominated achitecture | Monolithic Architecture |
Integration model | None |
Standards | None |
Concepts and theories | Information theory, theory of control, cybernetics |
2. Function-Oriented Paradigm
Industry trends | Personal Computers, LANs, WANs, RDBMS, object-oriented programming, component-oriented programming |
Business demands | Lower cost of automation, addressing unique needs of particular users |
Automation focus | Individual functions of users and groups |
Dominated achitecture | Database-Centric (Two- or Multi-tier) Architecture |
Integration model | Transfering data between databases, RPCs |
Standards | Ethernet, TCP/IP, SQL |
Concepts and theories | Functional decomposition, UML |
3. Process-Oriented Paradigm
Industry trends | Wide spread of automation, Globalization, Internet, service-oriented programming, Wireless networks |
Business demands | More sustainable integration, higher reuse |
Automation focus | Business processes within organization |
Dominated achitecture | Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) |
Integration model | Orchestration of business processes by middleware |
Standards | HTTP, Web Services, BPML |
Concepts and theories | Business process modeling, Organization theory |
4. Goal-Oriented Paradigm
Industry trends | Wide use of sensor technologies, Mobile devices, Virtual Reality, Artificial Intelligence and Robots |
Business demands | Lower integration cost, higher efficiency and transparency, better flexibility, more comprehensive automation |
Automation focus | Organization-wide goals broken down into subgoals of individual groups and users |
Dominated achitecture | Multi-agent Architecture (?), Model-Oriented Architecture (?) |
Integration model | Natural gapless integration based on common principles and standards |
Standards | ?? |
Concepts and theories | Theory of Management Automation (?) |
As you can see from this analysis, management automation has actually come full circle. It started with the organization in a small-scale, jumped to the individual user/group level, rose to the cross-user/cross-group level, and finally returned to the organization level in a comprehensive wide-scale way.
Hopefully, this comparison helped to better explain the four paradigm shifts.
In my next post, I will be further explaining the OODA Loop concept that C2/GOMA rests on. Stay tuned!
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