Almost 30 years ago, in 1972, when I was a sophomore at Cornell, I took a course with the title, “systems analysis and design.”  It was taught by George Nemhauser, a well known scholar in operations research.  Even though the course was titled, “systems analysis and design,” it wasn’t about computers at all!  Those of you who are as old as I am will remember that “systems analysis and design” was originally about the systems approach – things that C. West Churchman and Russell Ackoff wrote about – where the systems approach actually predated computer technology.  For those of you who are much younger than I am, I believe that you're familiar with the “true” systems approach through your studies of biology – in particular, ecology.  Today, even high school students are familiar with how ecology explains that there is a web of relationships in an “ecosystem,” and how a change in one part of the ecosystem (like the introduction of DDT) can ripple through the rest of the ecosystem where it has all sorts of effects, especially unforeseen and unpredictable effects that we first become aware of only after they emerge.  Well, this is an example of what true systems thinking is really about, and it does NOT have anything to do with computers!

Some of the familiar concepts of the original systems approach are:

· a system typically contains subsystems,
· a subsystem affects other subsystems,
· a system is more that just the sum of its subsystems, and
· any system is typically a subsystem within a larger system, and so forth.

And if we wish to intervene in a system, we must consider the entire system.  The field of sociotechnical systems, for example, tells us that any attempt to optimize a technology subsystem, without also considering the larger system or the behavioral subsystem, will not only lead to a suboptimal solution, but can even lead to an infeasible course of action in the first place.

When I explain to my students how the original systems approach sees an information system, I use an analogy from chemistry.  I tell them that...