Engaging Intellectual Capital

Essay by miss_loveUniversity, Master's November 2006

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Globalization, competition and the development of the information systems and technology, forced the organizations to find and adopt new processes and techniques and structures to increase the business productivity in this global world and improve the service level and quality to satisfy the customers and deliver the desired value to them. Among these techniques, is soft system thinking as a tool of these processes.

In this paper, the soft system thinking (SSM) will be represented and the role that SSM and the knowledge can play in the creation of an organization's intellectual capital and social capital. In addition to that, this paper will illustrate the problems that may face the organization when applying such techniques.

We are surrounded by systems. Even our bodies are made up of different systems. The planet is part of solar system. We connect to people in various groups: social, economic, and political systems. Most of the organizations would not survive without an information system (IS).

One of these systems that connect and considered within IS and among these is SSM. (Anon, 2004).

Before elaborating more into SSM. Let us go into the origin of this system and how it is developed. It has been developed by a professor called Peter Checkland in the late 1960s with the general objective of complementing hard system methodology (HSM) and guiding intervention or change in human organizations. It was felt at that time that HSM characterized by the systems approach of Jenkins (1972), relied too heavily on the availability of a clear and specific objective, and on a clear problem definition. And it was apparent that HSM dealing with human problems is very limited (Ho; Sculli, 1994). Peter (1960) began researching the fundamentals of systems thinking where he found that system engineering could not cope with the mangers problems...