The increased application of Information Technology in organizations, has led to the development of intelligent software that can handle various conventional management functions. Distributed Artificial Intelligence (DAI) views such autonomous software applications as intelligent agents, and the complex systems as a collection of such interacting agents. Extending this to management, an organization is viewed as a multi-agent system (human and software) in which a manager is viewed as an agent in the hierarchy. This paper gives a new perspective to such systems, accommodating a blend of human and machine skills. The skills required for various management processes are equated with intelligent agent properties, and a new model, which has the ability to compare the efficiency of man and machine in handling similar managerial functions, is proposed.
Information Technology (IT) has started replacing humans in many processes and functions once thought to require human intelligence. Such entities are called `Intelligent Agents' in the Artificial Intelligence (AI) literature. Future systems will no longer distinguish between interactions of humans and non-humans (Parunak, 1996). AI scientists and sociologists consider an organization as a specific solution created by a collection of many agents (human/non-human), each assigned with one or more tasks/roles, and having interrelations with others to achieve common goals (Jeans and Heinz, 2000). This agent-based approach to organizations as a Multi-Agent System (MAS) has been applied to many fields including Internet services, manufacturing, and supply chain management. The concept of managers acting as Intelligent Agents with focused skills in the organizational context is gaining currency of late.
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