Systemic Business

This web page is an archive of the temporary electronic meeting place for the Special Integration Group (SIG) on Systems Applications in Business and Industry. The SIG convened in Shanghai, on August 2-6, 2002, at the 46th Annual Meeting of the International Society for the Systems Sciences.

The founders of the Systemic Business Community -- who hosted this content -- first met in the SABI SIG sessions led by Enrique Herrscher at the 1999 Asilomar meeting, and the 2000 World Congress in Toronto. For the 2002 meeting, one of the Systemic Business Community founders, David Ing, facilitated the sessions in this track, as an acting chair.

Traditionally, authors have not presented their papers within the SABI SIG session. Interaction has taken place in a facilitated roundtable format. It has been assumed that attendees had had the opportunity to look over all of the papers for the session (or at least the abstracts) prior to attendance. Each author was given a few minutes to capsulize the most important ideas of the paper, and then a roundtable discussion took place.

Prior to attending the sessions, attendees at the sessions were requested to browse the papers (or at least the abstracts!) for all of the speakers in that session. The doors were not bolted from others attending, but informed conversation is always better than uninformed comments! The discussion in the Shanghai sessions flowed in the following format:

• Chair: Invitation for session participants to introduce themselves.
• For each paper ...
1. Author(s): Summarize the key ideas from the paper (2 minutes)
2. Participants: Voice comments on the paper, from three perspectives:
• Key insights I got from the paper.
• How I might apply these insights (in this context, or another context)
• Additional ideas I might suggest to the author(s)
3. Chair: Summarize comments across the participants
• Participants: Comment on learning integrated across all (seven of the) paper in the session
• Chair: Summarize the key learnings from the session

An online discussion forum was set up on the Systems Sciences Ezboard. The forum was open not only to the attendees at the SABI SIG, but to all ISSS members, and in fact, the world at large. (There are functions that the moderator could invoke to block unwelcome participation, but at of July 2002, this was an experiment from which the ISSS can learn to design new and better methods of communications.) This discussion forum is now inactive, and the content was archived here!

To view the 2002 SABI program, please continue on to ...

• SABI 2002 Roundtables in Shanghai