We ought to observe also that even the things which follow after the things which are
produced according to nature contain something pleasing and attractive.
Marcus Aurelius: The Meditations, Book Three (Written 167 AD)

Nature is often the source of inspiration for those who seek improved organizational effectiveness. One finds evidence of that in the writings of the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu, to the the mediations of the Roman philosopher king Marcus Aurelius. In many religious traditions, references are often made to nature as an open book whose lessons can provide guidance to man’s organizational concerns. Nature, not only inspires certain strategies, but also provides a rich language of metaphors that help describe aspects of human organization.

A Corporate Information Infrastructure (CII) can be likened to the central nervous system of the organization. It deals in transmitting, storing, and responding to the flow of information across many layers of the organization, as well as sensing and sometimes responding to changes external to those of the organization. As nervous systems go, one can observe that there is a tremendous variety from very simple worms to those of vertebrates and higher animals. Following that analogy we can trace the evolution of corporate information infrastructure.

In the early days, when computer first made their debut outside academia, the focus was primarily on storage and retrieval of data, and hence the CII was nothing more than a large database, and only very elementary data manipulation was carried out. In biological terms it did very little and could be likened to the coordination activity that goes on in a single celled organism, the image of an amoeba perhaps being fitting here.

With time, the need and opportunity arose for the coordination of data collection, storage, retrieval, and presentation through different parts of the organization and hence Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems were born. Unlike natural system, the different components of the ERP system were not allowed to grow organically to perfectly match the needs of the organization. Instead, the system was often force fitted to the organization, using the often cited “best practices”. One can imagine the ERP system as the nervous system of a simple worm. In the case of the worm, it is coordinating locomotion, digestion, and reproduction, while for the ERP system it may be coordinating Sales, Finance, and Human Resources.

While we are not attacking “best practices” here, we can object to their use as an excuse for poorly force fitting them throughout ERP systems within organizations. Due to such force fitting, it not surprising that more than 50% of ERP implementations are reported as unsuccessful. Prior to ERP implementation, a company is likely to have carried out coordination activities throughout the enterprise, albeit very inefficiently. Such pre-ERP coordination has resulted in certain work-flow patterns. When an ERP implementation severely disrupts such patterns, paralysis or seizure ensues. It becomes like an implant that does not suit the corporate DNA. In such disruptive situations three possible outcomes are likely 1) rapid adoption/adaptation, 2) rejection of the ERP system, or 3) total collapse of the organization itself.

To avoid such ERP implementation disruptions, companies must reflect on their existing business processes and see how they deviate from the implicit assumption of an ERP system’s “best practices” model. This exercise might reveal that some of the “best practices” might not be optimal for the environment in which the organization is operating. It is likely to reveal that a certain amount of process re-engineering might be required prior to implementing the ERP system. To ensure success and that widespread adoption of the changes in work patterns are relevant, corporate stakeholders must be made aware of those changes and have the opportunity to provide feedback.

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR), may hence play a pivotal role in ensuring the success of ERP implementation. But it also does a great deal more than pave the way for ERP systems. BRP may also guide CII evolution to carry out more useful decision making and information processing activities.

With an ERP system in place and corporate business processes well understood and documented, the road is paved to push the CII to something resembling the nervous system seen in higher animals. The exploitation of ERP data plays a key role here. Adding business intelligence (BI) applications and technologies allows the organization to access timely and good quality information. In a sense the organization is now “self aware”; it now understands its position versus its competitors in real time, its trends and predictions, and its customers’ preferences and tastes can be tracked. However one needs to make a distinction between canned BI tools that come with most ERP packages and custom BI tools that are built specifically around the company, its operation, and data. It is custom BI tools that provide the competitive advantage and help guide tactical as well as strategic thinking. Whatever edge BI tools initially provide, it is soon blunted by widespread adoption.

The latest BI systems go well beyond score cards and dashboards to using some of the latest techniques in Computational Intelligence (CI). CI techniques happen to borrow from nature some of its most powerful approaches to problem solving. For pattern detection, prediction and data classification are used in Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) which attempt to mimic the way the brain works, and for optimization it uses Evolutionary Algorithms (EA) which capture the salient features of natural biological evolution.

We now seem to have come full circle, from trying to make sense of CII evolution and problems by using biological metaphors, to outline the most advanced tools that are used in BI. As more companies build ever sophisticated CII with enhanced decision support capabilities using BI, a co-evolutionarily battle field emerges. The winners will be the ones who will be able to deploy nature’s wisdom to full effect.

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Dr. Mohammed El-Beltagy
Dr. El-Beltagy has a BSc from the AUC, an MSc from Lancaster University and a PhD from the University of Southampton, UK. He is an expert at applying state of the art optimization, machine learning, and Agent Based Modeling techniques to complex business problems. Before returning to Egypt, he was a senior scientist at BiosGroup, Inc. in the United States where he served numerous projects involving some of the largest companies in the world (Ford, SAP, P&G, to name but a few). Dr. El-Beltagy lectures at Cairo University on Computational Intelligence, Data Mining and Game Theory.
He is also the founder of Optomatica, a business analytics consultancy. He can be reached at mohammed@optomatica.com.