A worldview reduces multiple interpretations into a single, stable perspective of reality. However, COI acts as a tradeoff in attention directed at reducing uncertainty in one of two interdependent factors, such as a worldview or business model or military plan of action, increasing uncertainty in its interdependent factor, such as opposing worldviews or an action taken in agreement with a worldview or the execution of a business model or the locations of a military plan’s chain of sequential or interdependent events. COI indicates that the more focused is a collective on acting out a series of steps, the less attention it has available to be observant of all of its actions. Applied to organizations, COI forms a causal path for different cultures based on multiple interpretations of the same worldview or business model or military plan of action. Four interdependent factors exist. COI links organizational uncertainty between planning and execution as well as between resource availability and the duration of a plan’s execution.
Published in Chapter:
Conservation of Information (COI): Geospatial and Operational Developments in E-Health and Telemedicine for Virtual and Rural Communities
Max E. Stachura (Medical College of Georgia, USA), Elena V. Astapova (Medical College of Georgia, USA), Hui-Lien Tung (Paine College, USA), Donald A. Sofge (Naval Research Laboratory, USA), James Grayson (Augusta State University, USA), Margo Bergman (Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center, USA), and Joseph Wood (US Army, USA)
Copyright: © 2010
|Pages: 22
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-61520-670-4.ch036
Abstract
The authors review telemedicine and e-health from an organizational perspective. To evaluate their effectiveness, they review organizational and system theory along with field and laboratory results. Theory of the conservation of information (COI) provides the means to study tradeoffs across space and over time as telemedicine and e-health management make operational decisions for virtual communities users. With the authors’ three case studies, they evaluate COI for telemedicine and e-health networks operating in the state of Georgia. After analyzing the case studies with COI, the authors close with a review of future trends that includes an interaction rate equation, an agent-based model (ABM) using natural selection (machine learning), and a Monte Carlo simulation of return on investments (ROI).