The importance of fractal phenomena to information decision-action systems

The authors´ experience in information decision-action systems (IDAS) is primarily with the specification, testing, and operation of large integrated military communication networks and computer systems that support military decision making. During the development cycle and under operational stress they have encountered examples of incompatibility between these IDAS and the people who use them. To understand these incompatibilities, they have taken ever broader perspectives to include the entire mission area, user organizations and non-military situations. From this perspective the authors have found that decision-makers, operators and system designers systematically underestimate the range of variation they are likely to encounter. They also found that fractal mathematics was often able to model the range of observed variation, relate the many components of these integrated processes, and clarify reasons for the persistence of incompatibilities. Their empirical work consists of analyzing real data sets for a fit to the hyperbolic distribution. When the hyperbolic distribution is found, or is expected from other related cases, the authors are often able to gain insights into the incompatibilities between users and the IDAS they employed. They discuss several examples of this. These empirical results stand on their own without reference to any underlying fractal mathematics