Collective Intelligence Systems from an Organizational Perspective

Abstract

In this talk, we consider Collective Intelligence (CI) systems [11-13, 15] from an organizational perspective. CI systems offer a solution to problems that need cognitive skills, problem-solving capabilities, knowledge, know-how or experience at large scale. They help to facilitate and streamline large-scale problem-solving endeavours. The organizational perspective on CI systems offers us two strands of discussion. On the one hand, it can be about understanding the potential of CI systems for today's organizations. On the other hand, CI systems can be considered as organizations themselves and can be investigated as such. We start by reviewing the state-of-the art of CI frameworks [19, 20]. What are the essential building blocks of a CI system? Who uses them? For what, how and why? We come up with a generalized framework [19] that serves us as a basis for further investigations. From a governance perspective, today's organizations are recursive-feedback control systems, usually expressed in the form of process-oriented management [5, 9, 10], see also [6, 7]. A deeper look reveals a plethora of different styles of organizational culture [14, 18]. Still, viable organizations have in common certain essential sub systems, which are policy making, external and internal steering, the primary activities and an informational backbone [1-3]. How can we exploit CI systems to support these organizational building blocks? Can CI systems be made an integral part of organizations to make them more stable towards distortions; more adaptive towards an ever changing environment; more agile towards the organization's innovative potential? Answers to such questions would free CI systems from being niche players in certain large-scale problem-solving initiatives. Reflecting back from the potential of CI systems in today's organizations, we ask: what can be learned with respect to the design and implementation of future CI systems; and: how to break the silos, i.e., how to integrate CI systems with related paradigms such as knowledge management systems, compare also with [4, 8, 16, 17] and latest computing resources such as big data and the data science toolkit?