>For some information on this you might check out
>http://portal.research.bell-labs.com/orgs/ssr/people/cope/Patterns/Process/index.html
>
>It is connected to a much larger web site with lots of other stuff on
>Alexander and patterns from the computer side. I found it fascinating
>and was very grateful for the push in that direction.
(Quick Intro.)
Hi there, my name is Michael Beedle. This is my first message to this
list. I am a principal at Framework Technologies, a management and
technical consulting company in the Chicago area, and I am also one of its
3 co-founders. In my previous life I was a research scientist, studying
"complexity". More info about me at my web site below. I am fascinated
by the discussions of this list, which I have eagerly read for the last
three weeks. Thanks to all of you for providing this highly dense,
interesting and friendly semiotic environment.)
(My comment.)
Yes, in fact, this paper by James O. Coplien, aka "Cope", was the seminal
work that lead a large community of writers, including myself, to capture
organizational patterns. Since then, and for about 3 years,
Organizational Patterns submissions have increased dramatically at the
PLOP and OOPSLA conferences.
Organizational Patterns build upon Christopher Alexander's pattern ideas,
but instead of designing buildings, they aim at creating "enterprise
architectures" that are complete, whole, and coherent hyper-productive and
that emphasize the quality of life of the individuals working in it.
At first, one would tend to think that "patterns" are something different
and distant from "management" topics, but as it turns out, Organizational
Patterns are right at the center of the current trends in business -
Complexity and Knowledge Management, because:
- they provide a conduit to externalize tacit knowledge,
- they allow knowledge to be stored and retrieved, and for this reason they
extend "corporate memory" and "corporate intelligence",
- they build a language upon which "communities of practice" can share
experience,
- they facilitate the socialization and recombination of knowledge,
(ultimately resulting in hyper-productive, learning and knowledge creating
comminutes)
simultaneously, (from the complexity point of view) they provide with:
- a way to format to capture the emergent patterns of a complex system
- a way to capture the "building blocks" of architectures in a domain.
- they provide a "language" that by its introduction changes the culture of
an organization
- they provide by aggregation what is termed as a "A Pattern Language",
which is a set of existing "...solutions to a problem in a context", where
the resulting context of one patterns leads to the initial context of the
next, forming sequences.
In fact a number of pattern writers (including myself), have started to
create what is termed as a Common Pattern Language (CPL) - a combination
of the existing organizational patterns from different domains.
You can find more information about this at (many of the patterns are
being combined with many additions and corrections):
http://www.bell-labs.com/cgi-user/OrgPatterns/OrgPatterns?ProjectIndex
There is also a mailing list organization-patterns@cs.uiuc.edu. (To
subscribe, send a request to organization-patterns-request@cs.uiuc.edu
containing a single word "subscribe" in the "Subject:" field.)
The intention of this pattern language is to create a coherent synergy of
the patterns of BPR, Learning Organizations, Knowledge Creating
Organizations, TQM, OO Enterprise System Architectures, and
hyper-productive software development, etc.; and to publish it for the
benefit of all of "us" practitioners in the field out there..
We are also organizing an Organizational Patterns workshop at ChiliPLOP98
(next March), to select:
- the architects of the CPL
- the main structure of the CPL
- responsibilities for pattern writers
- deliverables in the form of books, web sites, etc.
(I will post the official "call for papers" for this workshop in this list
shortly.)
Regards,
- Mike Beedle
http://www.fti-consulting.com/users/beedlem/
* For those of you that have an interest in learning more about patterns,
you can find more information at:
http://www.fti-consulting.com/users/beedlem/patterns.html
* Someone asked in this list recently what do you do with all the
knowledge found in the many books, articles, web sites, etc.; one way to
deal with this problem is to crate a synergized knowledge repository - A
Pattern Language :-)
* Mike McMaster's "The Intelligence Advantage" touches on many things
relevant to this approach as well.
--"Michael A. Beedle" <beedllem@fti-consulting.com>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>