A Computational Framework for Experimentation with Edge Organizations
Abstract
Edge organizations emphasize moving knowledge and decision-making power to individuals and teams who directly interface with the environment. Traditional project modeling tools cannot adequately represent the critical impact of information and knowledge flows, nor the importance of developing trust between workers in Edge organizations. The Virtual Design Team (VDT) computational modeling platform evolved from ongoing research at Stanford University starting in the late 1980s. VDT has been used successfully to model activities, communications, and exception handling within traditional project organizations performing relatively routine, albeit highly concurrent, tasks. This paper discusses POWER, a new computational modeling platform based on the same information processing view of organizations as VDT. POW-ER is an extensible organization simulation platform, within which we have prototyped direct support for modeling several critical dynamic behaviors of workers in modern knowledge-based organizations: knowledge flows, trust effects, and cultural/ institutional differences between team members from different backgrounds. POW-ER can also support demand-driven, dynamic allocation of resources to tasks as needed, to model work processes that cannot be represented by predefined tasks. Using POW-ER, researchers can now conduct emulation experiments on Edge organizations to validate and calibrate the computational model, ultimately aiding in the systematic design and optimization of these organizational forms.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Jun 01, 2005
- Accession Number
- ADA464187
Entities
People
- Marc S. Ramsey
- Raymond E. Levitt
Organizations
- Stanford University