Peter Senge describes an unstable (beer ordering) system in his book The Fifth Discipline.
I agree with his suggestion that the missing discipline is system thinking.
Once the connection to system thinking has been established it is a matter of determining the edge of the system, and then modelling it.
Peter Senge does not suggest modelling systems. It is a natural extension.
There are numerous techniques for modelling systems that can be applied to business processes. Business processes can be modelled as delays, feed back loops, and amplifiers. It should then be possible to use standard control techniques to determine the impact of various inputs to the system.
Techniques such as Bode Plots and Laplace can be used to understand the system.
For example, the "beer ordering" example in the Fifth Disipline describes the response you would expect from a Chebyshev filter when a step impulse is applied. Analsys of this system in the S-Plane could be used to determine the response.
Therefore, in determining the limits of a business process, one should identify all of the feedback loops that directly influence the behaviour of the system. This may be outside the organisation under analysis.
Posted by chrismatts at June 20, 2003 8:10 PM