This portal aims to bring together the latest thinking on the development of required behaviour in complex systems.

So, what's the problem?  It will have not have escaped even the most casual of observers that there seems to be a growing propensity for 'challenging' systems development initiatives to fail; these are often most prominently related to enterprise-level information systems (of systems), but not exclusively so.  Why should this be? 

Recent advances across a range of modern sciences have provided us with a much clearer insight to the development of often surprising, sometimes beneficial but all-too-frequently, unexpectedly detrimental aspects of behaviour in complex systems.  They highlight the importance of being able to deal with relationships and interactions between dynamic systems of systems, the very aspects that tend to be implicitly discounted in traditional approaches to system design and development, based on decomposition.

Whilst new insights help us to explain what we see, and understand why traditional approaches often fall short, the ability to design for required performance and behaviour in complex systems is yet to mature, and related ideas are neither widely accepted nor understood.  We should hardly be surprised; these ideas draw upon new, often unfamiliar and occasionally counter-intuitive areas of science and do not appear to sit easily with more traditional approaches. 

Understanding behaviour is the first step towards being able to design for it, but only the first step.  So, we have 2 objectives in shaping this portal, the first is the development of understanding, the second and possibly more difficult, is to expose the most effective application of that understanding. 

Stuart T Sowray