Deconstructing Reality

Computerworld - While much of the Santa Fe, N.M., complexity community is building virtual worlds, Strategic Analytics Inc. focuses on dismantling the real world. It helps companies separate the complex mesh of events and interactions that affect customer behavior over time, enabling them to see how much behavior can be attributed to the company's actions and how much is due to environmental factors like the economy.

"We untangle that," explains Strategic Analytics President Joseph Breeden.

The company analyzes all of those interactions and separates them into what looks like a series of overlaid seismograph traces. For example, for a credit card client interested in understanding the reasons for customer attrition, one trace shows attrition as a series of shocks over time. Another shows changes in the economy over the same period. Another shows competitive pressures, and so on.

"You have seasonality, policy changes, the environment, economics, competition. And we get a complex blend of all this data and use technology to extract the pieces," says Breeden. "We break it up into major parts and show that this spike is because of something you did; this long trend is due to the economy."

Seeing that kind of cause-and-effect scenario enables a company to compare the past and the present in a meaningful way and make more useful decisions about the future.

For example, Strategic Analytics is beginning to help Seattle-based online retailer Amazon.com Inc. with customer relationship management. "Amazon wants to drive revenue and profitability, so they're thinking about how to get profitability over the lifetime of an account," says Breeden, who declined to offer more specifics about what Amazon hopes to get out of the engagement with his firm.

Complex Adaptive Systems Resources

Online

Complex Systems Web sites


From the Center for the Study of Complex Systems at the University of Michigan. This site has a good list of links to related research areas, publications, tools, mailing lists, other centers for research and more.

Complexity, Complex Systems & Chaos Theory Organizations as Self-Adaptive Complex Systems Page


From Brint.com. Find papers, publications, tools and other resources here. This is a long list of links.

Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity


Research reports, surveys and books in computational complexity from the computer science department at the University of Trier in Germany.

Consilience: Case studies in complex adaptive systems


Notes, discussion and projects from a Princeton University seminar.

Complex Systems Virtual Library


From Charles Sturt University in Australia.

Online CS Techreports


Search here for related papers on complex adaptive systems.

Complexity Online


This is a scientific information network about complex systems.