Using Feedback Control Principles as Guiding Metaphors for Business Processes.

This paper asks: how do we apply the fundamental principles of feedback in physical systems to business processes? This is a tempting idea because feedback is clearly present in business/decision processes, but as in the case of feedback of biological systems, getting beyond the qualitative and phenomenological descriptions to models with structure for which parameters can be determined from measurements is difficult. In this context, what can feedback principles, so often based on rigid mathematical analysis, provide to such systems for which any mathematical rigor is hard to end? Our approach in this section will be inspired by the words of Captain Barbosa in Pirates of the Caribbean[1], as to think of fundamental feedback principles as guidelines, rather than actual rules. That being said, we believe those guidelines provide a rich source of correction for business processes. In the end our feedback-fundamentals inspired guidelines may not guarantee us only correct decisions, but they can keep us away from practices we would never try in engineering systems.