“Atrium” — A Knowledge Model for Modern Security Forces in the Information and Terrorism Age

Abstract

Eighty percent of business process reengineering efforts have failed. This piece argues that the missing piece is an ability to see the newer technical systems conceptually integrated into an organization as well as functionally embedded. Similarly, a model of a modern military or security institution facing asymmetries in active security threats and dealing with extremely limited strategic depth needs to focus less on precision strikes and more on knowing what can be known in advance. Finding that most published designs and existing relations were based on rather static notions of accessing only explicitly collected knowledge, I turned to the development of an alternative socio-technical organizational design labeled the “Atrium” model based on the corporate hyperlinked model of Nonaka and Takeuchi. The rest of this work presents the basics of this model as applied to a military organization, though it could conceivably apply to any large scale security force.