Brief History
Section 2 - Company Focus
At a macro level, PANGARO Incorporated provides corporate consulting services
in these broad categories:
From a micro level, PANGARO Incorporated specializes in the definition and
solution of problems that do not yield to the usual technical or analytical
approaches. Modern cybernetics provides
methodologies for describing complex systems and component interactions,
such as:
- The definition of "user requirements" such that they proceed
from the needs of use and the values of the community of users, rather than
the capabilities of the technology or biases of the implementors
- The relationship of a software interface to the user's internal, cognitive
model, to defend against the user forming a hypothesis and considering it
as "reality"
- The history of interaction between software and a user, to provide a
valuable degree of "personalization" and response to that individual's
needs, uncertainties and goals (as, for example, in training or job-aiding)
- The definition of an expert's solution paths as derived from a straightforward
elicitation of actions, conditions, and reasons, to produce an expert system
with the unusual features of common sense representation, simple extensibility,
and the deletion of the "knowledge engineer"
- The requirements for user interactions for the definition of "intelligent
agents", coordination software, and "groupware"
- The evolution of the corporation, from its 19th Century hierarchical
control structures for mechanical design and production, to distributed
control via shared models resulting in 21st Century organizations, products
and services that are adaptive and modeled on living systems
- The critical role of modern information technology for close-coupling
of actors in modern commerce, for achieving cost-effective and time-efficient
"demand-activated production", where customer and supplier co-create
tailored solutions
- The modeling of organizational and social relationships (for example,
in a large corporation or group design process), to improve self-understanding
and to show pathologies of control, loss of internal feedback, or neglect
of purpose
- The relationships among an employee, a company's training procedures,
a customer and a corporation, to show (for example) if top level goals of
the corporation are fulfilled, and whether or not in a manner con-sistent
with individual values and responsibilities
- The processes of learning and self-understanding within any "group",
including the role of language, individual self-interest and the social
context.
Each of these descriptions comes directly from contract work, and each is
an example of the general application of cybernetics to individual, "real-world"
problems.
Products of the work include software systems and/or analytical models,
which provide insight into the history, and guidance for the future, of
an organization or computer application. Later sections describe some of
these projects in detail.
Section 3 - Clients
PANGARO Incorporated History - Table of Contents