| Organizations are among the most valuable and yet most fragile structures of our civilization. We rely on organizations to obtain information, to comprehend and process information, to accumulate and internalize information, to make decisions based in part on that information, and to execute those decisions. Organizations are ubiquitous because they are indispensable. From the most primitive to the most complex societies, organizations of various types have constituted the backbone of societal decision-making.
This book explores recent developments in computational solutions to problems of exploiting or mitigating vulnerabilities within organizational decision-making processes. It describes a range of computational techniques that can help to guide attacks on an adversary’s organization or the defense of one’s own.
From an engineering perspective, the applications of the techniques described in this book cover a broad range of practical problems. They include planning and command of military operations against an enemy command organization, military and foreign intelligence, antiterrorism and domestic security, information security, organizational design, military psychology and training, management practice, and organizational computing. In particular, one discipline—information warfare [1]—traditionally paid special attention to issues related to attacking and defending military command organizations.
Computational approaches applicable to such problems originate in several scientific disciplines: computational organization theory, organizational and management sciences, artificial intelligence planning, cognitive modeling, and game theory. A key objective of this work is to demonstrate important close relations between ideas coming from such diverse areas. |