Viktor Glushkov’s and
to the governance of states in the 21st Century
Leonid Ototsky – http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it
Email : lototsky@mail.ru
Webpage : http://paterleo.wikispaces.com
Preface
This is an English version of a
presentation I made to an OGAS Web Conference organized by the
Ukrainian National Academy of Science ( http://www.nas.gov.ua/en/Pages/default.aspx
)
in memory of Viktor Glushkov in 2011 ( http://www.springerlink.com/conten”t/r671316513t41251/
).
1. Introduction
In earlier papers I have written
about the importance of using the heritage of the “father” of Management
Cybernetics
-
I think that Beer´s
work is of great significance for information technologists in the XXI Century
[1(rus),2 ].
Particularly in my paper “Stafford
Beer and & Cybersyn” of
Enterprise Resources Planning vendors such as
Oracle and SAP, we already find features of Beer´s
Viable System Model (VSM).
Indeed Oracle´s
BAM and SAP´s SEM already
use key notions of the VSM such as “real time” , visualization
of
business-processes and events with the
support of special “dashboards”, exception reporting, algedonic
signals and
scaling reporting ( http://paterleo.wikispaces.com
) ( http://www.sap.com/solutions/business-suite/erp/sapsem.epx
).
I think that the next step in these
developments should be the collaboration between IT vendors and the Stafford
Beer
community. Modern
information technology offers significantly more possibilities to realize the “nervous
system” of the VSM
than
was possible at the time of the Cybersyn more than 40
years ago (Beer, 1975, 1981). Indeed using tools such as
Web-services and transportable devices make it
much more real to creating “virtual” Operations Rooms (OR) and
to decentralize
sending “alerting reports”. Considering that at the “heart” of the Cybersyn Project was an
Operations Room [3 – rus ], it
is not surprising that IBM and Oracle expressed interest in the VSM in
correspondence
I had with people from those
companies in 2007 ( http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/metaphorum2007.htm
). It is of historic and
symbolic
significance that at the same time of the Cybersyn Project
there was another very similar project in the
directed by the
famous Soviet cyberneticist Victor Glushkov ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Glushkov
).
It was a nationwide project to
control the Soviet economic system; this was the National Automatized
System
of
Administration of the Economy “OGAS” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Glushkov
- OGAS ) .
2. OGAS beginning
In his memories Glushkov
described in detail the history of information technology in the
( http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_333.htm
). He was responsible for the creation
and implementation
of
cybernetic ideas in the
Automatized System of Administration of the Economy or in short
OGAS. In the mid-60s Glushkov
proposed
a preliminary design of a network of computer centers in the USSR (ESGVC),
which included more than
100 centers in big cities and regions, which
were planned to link via computer centers with enterprises and the
Regions.
The total number of necessary computer centers was estimated up to 20.000. In
his memories Glushkov wrote that
the task to create
OGAS was proposed to him by Alexey Kosygin, at the
time Vice Prime Minister of the
in November of the
1962. It was academician Keldysh ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mstislav_Keldysh
) who introduced
Glushkov to Kosygin. The ESGVC project encompassed data bases and
data protection tools using electronic information
exchange. Those
technologies weren’t used at that time anywhere in the World; the ESGVC Project
was a secret until 1977.
Beyond IT technologies Glushkov
had developed mathematical models for the economic governance
( http://www.icfcst.kiev.ua/MUSEUM/Gl_hall2/science2.html
) .
A photo of Mstislav
Keldysh and Viktor Glushkov
It is of note to realize that
approximately at the same time, supported by less resources and technology,
but underpinned by
the Viable System Model, a new conceptual model (Beer, 1972), another project
comparable
to
OGAS was being developed in
created
by Stafford Beer.
3.
About Cybersyn
If attempts to implement OGAS were
mostly restricted to the Glushkov’s Cybernetics
Institute in
the Cybersyn Project was implemented for the Chilean government
with the knowledge and support of President Allende
himself.
From the National Development Corporation (CORFO) Fernando Flores and Raul Espejo had written to the
English cyberneticist Stafford Beer
inviting him to support the development of a cybernetic governance system for
the
Chilean government, with the use of
the existing information and communication technologies, aiming at making
possible
the complementarity between a socialist state
embedding autonomous units of production and services.
To their surprise Beer immediately
agreed to their proposal. Beer put aside some other projects and arrived to
in
November of 1971. This was not accidental; Beer had clear that countries in the
“Rich World” had not understood
Cybernetics as
an instrument of governance.
4.
Mastering
A conference in tribute to Stafford
Beer’s heritage took place in March 2003 at the London School of Economics,
few
months after his death in
by
another in June 2003 at the
interested
in Beer’s work ( http://itsy.co.uk/archive/staffordian/about.htm
). This conference offered directions to develop Beer’s heritage,
which
were further developed at a Conference in
discussed, among
other topics, the importance of the VSM in the governance of modern states.
This was the topic of the contribution
of Andrei Sergeev (
break-down
of the
( http://ototsky.mgn.ru/it/metaphorum2006.htm
) discussed the issue of increasingly complex artifacts, which are more and
more
beyond the possibilities of “support”. The task of maximum reduction of manhours for developing and supporting
“complex
objects” is becoming increasingly relevant. Main vendors have begun to try “to
automate” this task. As an example
we now have the
“Autonomic Computing of IBM” ( http://www.zurich.ibm.com/pdf/ebizz/idd-ac.pdf
), whose design makes
apparent some VSM
features. Work more specifically focused on the Cybersyn
Project has been done
by the Chilean
multimedia artists Enrique Rivera and Catalina Ossa;
they exhibited a “multimedia reconstruction”
of this project at the Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie,
at
the website http://www.cybersyn.cl/ingles/home.html
. This reconstruction displayed a modern computerized replica
of
the original chairs designed for the Cybersyn Operations Room, which was linked to a similar
chair in the
Cultural Centre of the Presidential Palace in
References
1. - http://www.computerra.ru/offline/2003/511/29598/
2. - http://www.ototsky.mgn.ru/it/presentations/paradiso2009m