Re: Any new thoughts on OTLT (One True Lookup Table)

From: Laconic2 <laconic2_at_comcast.net>
Date: Thu, 1 Apr 2004 12:04:54 -0500
Message-ID: <UMOdncmF4sUM1vHdRVn-jg_at_comcast.com>


I'd like to come back to the health care industry later.

But I'd like to take a third industry, other than health care or banking. It's air traffic control. If you ask air traffic controllers what the core of their business is, they will tell you that it's to keep airplanes from bumping into each other. If you ask them whether information management is at the core of their business, thay will say, "Only to the extent that it helps us keep the airplanes apart."

But let's use different terminology. Let's ask the controller whether keeping airplanes apart involves control and communication in people and machines, tied together in a system. A lot of controllers will say that you've just described the whole thing in a nutshell. The same is true for almost every field of endeavor. They all involve communication and control.

A little over a half century ago, the advent of more complex and more automatic machines gave rise to a new interdisciplinary field of study, which they called the science of communication and control. They needed a name for it, so they coined a word. The word, coined I believe by Norbert Wiener, was "cybernetics".

Now if you ask me which enterprises are cybernetic systems, I'm going to go out on a limb and say: "All of them." Received on Thu Apr 01 2004 - 19:04:54 CEST

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