The Systemic Acquis of Public Administration

The “systemic acquis” wording revalorises the concepts used in building the European Union. By similarity with these, the public administration’s systemic acquis will include the concepts, theories and fundamental results belonging to the General Theory of Systems and applying to the administrative systems. For the public administration, their systemic acquis will also grasp a specific of their evolution and manifestation. The social systemic, mainly developed by the French specialised schools, the organisational theories and the cybernetics will form adjacent theories that will complete the domain and content of the systemic acquis wording. The present manuscript is, in fact, an introduction to this complex issue and it can be completed by new contributions that shape a science of the public administration’s systemsadministrative systems cybernetics, systemic models

The future of Cybersecurity in Italy: Strategic focus area

This volume has been created as a continuation of the previous one, with the aim of outlining a set of focus areas and actions that the Italian Nation research community considers essential. The book touches many aspects of cyber security, ranging from the definition of the infrastructure and controls needed to organize cyberdefence to the actions and technologies to be developed to be better protected, from the identification of the main technologies to be defended to the proposal of a set of horizontal actions for training, awareness raising, and risk management

Complexity, Emergence and the Challenges of Assurance: The Need for a Systems Paradigm

The complexity of modern products, systems, and processes makes the task to identify, characterise, and provide sufficient assurance about the desirable properties a major challenge. Stakeholders also demand a degree of enhanced confidence about the absence of undesirable properties with a potential to cause harm or loss. This develops a framework of seven fundamental facets of performance as an ontology for emergent behavioural properties and a separate framework for the emergent structural properties of complex systems. The emergent behavioural aspects are explored and we develop a systems framework for assurance based on an Assessment and Management paradigm each comprising a number of principles and processes. The key argument advanced is that in the face of complexity and incessant change, enhanced confidence in the achievement of desirable and avoidance of undesirable properties requires a systems approach empowered by suitable modelling and relevant diagnostic tools explaining the nature of emergent properties. Our principal focus is on safety, security, and sustainability emergent behavioural (performance) aspects of complex products, systems, and processes

Deferred Action: Theoretical model of process architecture design for emergent business processes

E-Business modelling and ebusiness systems development assumes fixed company resources, structures, and business processes. Empirical and theoretical evidence suggests that company resources and structures are emergent rather than fixed. Planning business activity in emergent contexts requires flexible ebusiness models based on better management theories and models . This paper builds and proposes a theoretical model of ebusiness systems capable of catering for emergent factors that affect business processes. Drawing on development of theories of the ‘action and design’class the Theory of Deferred Action is invoked as the base theory for the theoretical model. A theoretical model of flexible process architecture is presented by identifying its core components and their relationships, and then illustrated with exemplar flexible process architectures capable of responding to emergent factors. Managerial implications of the model are considered and the model’s generic applicability is discussed

Learning from the Anthropocene: Adaptive Epistemology and Complexity in Strategic Managerial Thinking

open access articleTurbulence experienced in the business and social realms resonates with turbulence unfolding throughout the biosphere, as a process of accelerating change at the stratigraphic scale termed the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene is understood as a multi‐dimensional limit point, one dimension of which concerns the limits to the lineal epistemology prevalent since the Age of the Enlightenment. This paper argues that future conditions necessitate the updating of a lineal epistemology through a transition towards resilience thinking that is both adaptive and ecosystemic. A management paradigm informed by the recognition of multiple equilibria states distinguished by thresholds, and incorporating adaptive and resilience thinking is considered. This paradigm is thought to enhance flexibility and the capacity to absorb influences without crossing thresholds into alternate stable, but less desirable, states. One consequence is that evaluations of success may change, and these changes are considered and explored as likely on‐going challenges businesses must grapple with into the future

Cybersecurity and cyber defence: national level strategic approach

Cybersecurity encompasses a broad range of practices, tools and concepts related closely to those of information and operational technology (OT) security. Cybersecurity is distinctive in its inclusion of the offensive use of information technology to attack adversaries. Use of the term “cybersecurity” as a key challenge and a synonym for information security or IT security confuses customers and security practitioners, and obscures critical differences between these disciplines. Recommendation for security leaders is that they should use the term “cybersecurity” to designate only security practices related to the defensive actions involving or relying upon information technology and/or OT environments and systems. Within this paper, we are aiming to explain “cybersecurity” and describe the relationships among cybersecurity, information security, OT security, IT security, and other related disciplines and practices, e.g. cyber defence, related to their implementation aligned with the planned or existing cybersecurity strategy at the national level. In the case study given example of The National Cybersecurity Strategy of the Republic of Croatia and Action plan is presented and elaborated. The Strategy’s primary objective is to recognize organizational problems in its implementation and broaden the understanding of the importance of this issue in the society

“Trade Routes of the Mind”: A Brief History of Information Art in Canada

H& IT ON probes the turbulent social environments generated by information technologies. In a suite of all-new photo- and language-based works, conceptual artist IAIN BAXTER& (a.k.a. Iain Baxter) stages a satirical theatre of far-from-equilibrium behaviours and trends characteristic of a chronically web-surfing culture. The artist’s intervention loosely adapts the irreverent format of Marshall McLuhan’s 1967 collaboration with graphic designer Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage—a constant inspiration to “the&Man,” as BAXTER& has recently re-branded himself—to explore the effects of social media on the contemporary information landscape. But make no mistake, there is nothing nostalgic about BAXTER’s nod to the “McCoolman,” as he calls him. As in all his work since 1968, BAXTER&’s approach to information is always hands on. H& IT ON follows BAXTER& as he plays with and repurposes artifacts and affects circulating within the trade routes of the Information Society to create an unruly collage of observation and ideas. H& IT ON also includes new essays by Adam Lauder and Dennis Durham that, for the first time, situate BAXTER&’s pioneering information- based practice historically within a North American context. Lauder’s essay positions BAXTER& within a distinctly Canadian tradition of information art characterized by a persistent focus on affect, embodiment, and the multitude. The first history of information art in Canada, Lauder’s “Trade Routes of the Mind” explores Canadian artists’s reading against the grain of indigenous formulations of information and the Information Society in the work of Harold A. Innis, McLuhan and others—from Bertram Brooker to General Idea and beyond. Durham’s essay compares and contrasts BAXTER&’s art of Visual Sensitivity Information as Co-President of the Vancouver- based N.E. Thing Co. with cybernetic representations of entropy found in the contemporaneous work of American artists Robert Smithson and Dan Graham. Durham’s essay is essential reading for understanding the international significance of BAXTER&. H& IT ON also includes a preface by renowned McLuhan and BAXTER& scholar, Richard Cavell