Information Professionals Association (IPA) Vice President and Cognitive Crucible podcast host, John Bicknell, recently published in the Unifying Themes in Complex Systems X, Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Complex Systems. The co-authored article, “Process Mining Organization Email Data and National Security Implications,” presents an analysis of corporations (or any organization) as emergent, self-organizing processes along with national security implications. He used a technique known as process mining to illuminate probabilistic information flows by examining email data.
IPA members who are interested in the following kinds of information-related capabilities might find this article of interest: macro-economic maneuver, stimulus-response probabilistic shifts in information flow, automated situational awareness of dynamically evolving events, cybernetics, directed entropy and induced network failure, reflexive control, and red teaming. Future work should develop creative measures and simulations for elucidating and exploiting process ecosystems further. Understanding ecosystem dynamics empirically answers operational questions of interest such as: how long will it take for specific information to reach a specific person, what is the organizational rhythm or tempo, how will the ecosystem react when information is injected at various entry points, how do adjacent ecosystems interact, and how long does it take for an ecosystem to recover? The technique may be deployed creatively to anticipate and capitalize on ecosystem reflexivity, orchestrate complex systems interplay, drive ecosystem entropy purposefully, or target micro-organizations, for example: a military unit or single corporation. To learn more, download the report, “Process Mining Organization Email Data and National Security Implications.” at https://doi.org/10.1007/