Mapping the Cybernetic Principles of Viable System Model to Enterprise Service Bus

IT in Industry, vol. 2, no. 3, 2014 Published online 27-Oct-2014
ISSN (Print): 2204-0595
Copyright © Authors 68 ISSN (Online): 2203-1731
Abstract—This paper describes the results of a theoretical
mapping of the cybernetic principles of the Viable System Model
(VSM) to an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) model, with the aim to
identify the management principles for the integration of services
at all levels in the enterprise. This enrichment directly
contributes to the viability of service-oriented systems and the
justification of Business/IT alignment within enterprise. The
model was identified to be suitable for further adaption in the
industrial setting planned within Australian governmental
departments.
Keywords—cybernetics; enterprise service bus; service
oriented architecture; viable system model
I. INTRODUCTION - THE NEED FOR ACTION
Nowadays, contemporaryenterprises aim to transform their
monolithic Information Technology (IT) infrastructures into
more agile and flexible software systems in order to improve
the aspects of management of enterprise services in the creation
and capture of service values [1]. Essentially, enterprise
services fall into four categories (Fig. 1), commonly outlined
according to Enterprise Architectures (EA) used in
organisations, each operating within a defined layer [2] that
includes:
Fig. 1. Four types of services in enterprise.
1. Business – is the most abstract layer that includes
representations of services that are present within
organisation in one form or another.
2. Data – is the layer that includes various data
manipulation services, both open-source and
proprietary.
3. Applications – is the implementation layer that exposes
IT functionality in the form of services using Web
Services, Application Programming Interfaces (API)s
and similar technologies.
4. Technology – is the layer that includes services, which
are the means for interconnecting IT assets to form an
infrastructure, so they can be utilised cooperatively.
In enterprise context, these services are in continuous
interaction with one another at various levels of service
abstraction. This interaction, vertically up the services pyramid
(alignment) or horizontally between services of the same level,
heavily influences the management of services within
organisations, as it usually goes beyond technical relationships
between system elements, to socio-technical settings that
include human-in-the-loop.
To manage IT services, organisations adapt various
methodologies, which include diverse range of Information
Technology Service Management (ITSM) frameworks.
Generally, ITSM focus goes beyond technology and internal
aspects of organisation, to the management of quality of
services provided to end-customers and the relationship with
them [3].
To transform monolithic IT systems, organisations adapt
the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is a
contemporary paradigm that has a potential to propagate
granularity to complex business processes within enterprise
setting by adapting the principles of service orientation [4].
These principles outline the roadmap for the decomposition of
the processes into loosely coupled services [5].
SOA is a systems design approach that emerged as a
response to ever-accelerating changes in business processes,
Mapping the Cybernetic Principles of Viable
System Model to Enterprise Service Bus
Nizami Jafarov and Edward Lewis
School of Engineering and Information Technology
University of New South Wales at Australian Defence Force Academy
n.jafarov@adfa.edu.au, e.lewis@adfa.edu.au

ISSN (Print): 2204-0595
Fig. 2. Basic SOA Scenario.
products and services [6]. Identified by some organisations as
the most important architectural paradigm in IT [7], SOA
outlines the design principles, patterns and techniques [8] that
address requirements for such system characteristics as the
increase of service quality, open standards, service abstraction
layers, discoverability, federation, extensibility, composability,
loose coupling, location transparency, organisational agility,
scalability, modularity, reusability, flexibility and
interoperability, amongst others [9]. These characteristics
enable the system to adapt rapidly to changes in either the
business environment or the technology that makes up the
infrastructure supporting the business.
In a common SOA environment two actors are playing the
main roles: service providers and service consumers. The
interaction often involves an intermediate registry or directory
that is used by both parties: service providers register to the
directory, so that consumers can discover them. Service
providers are also endowed with service contracts that outline
their functionality and connectivity options for the potential
service consumers, as depicted in the figure below (Fig. 2).
However, along with SOA that outlines the principles of
service orientation, another important component that enables
some or most of these principles has also emerged. This
component is Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).
ESB, often coined as a backbone of SOA [10], is the critical
component of SOA infrastructure [11] that provides essential
communication and integration facilities required to
implement service-oriented systems [12]. ESB arose as one of
the important SOA compound design patterns [13] and can be
described as a highly distributed, message-oriented
middleware integration engine that is built upon open
standards to provide routing, invocation and mediation
mechanisms to maximize quality of service interaction and
transaction management between pervasive services in a secure
and reliable manner [14]. Its capabilities in message handling
Fig. 3. Basic ESB Scenario.
also enable the design of systems that can be readily integrated
with each other, so they can also adapt to rapid changes in
supply or demand [15]. The use of an ESB is a response to the
risks of ineffectual and inefficient enterprises that arise from
such changes.
In a common ESB-enabled environment, applications are
integrated through a variety of adaptors and integrations
brokers that expose applications functionality in the form of
service end-points. These endpoints interact with each other in
an asynchronous manner, by utilising the reliable message
delivery and other services of ESB that acts as an intermediate
layer between the participants, as depicted in the figure below
(Fig. 3).
ESB implementation is considered to be one of the core
milestones in the realization of SOA in organisations [16].
Nowadays, the market is overblown by numerous varieties of
ESB products with quite distinct sets of features that
complicate and delaythe overall adaption of ESBs in enterprise
environment [17]. The central challenge for the adaption of
ESB is the absence of consensus on the common model of ESB:
although, professionals in both industry and academia propose
sets of features ESB shall be endowed with [15], [18]–[21],
there are no principles that outline the standardized approach
that would combine these features into a justified holistic
whole, nor is there an approach that would discriminate
between the overlapping features or those that do not contribute
to the integrity of the system from the ones that do. Moreover,
interpretation of the existing principles varies from vendor to
vendor, which complicates the management of the necessary
integration of enterprise services.
To overcome such issues, the Viable Enterprise Service Bus
Model (VESBM) is proposed. VESBM is created from the
symbiosis of ESB and the Viable System Model (VSM) to
provide a roadmap for the generation of a vendor-neutral
blueprint for the management of distinct middleware
infrastructures that drive the integration of the services that
form the IT infrastructure. This paper describes the results
from the theoretical mapping of the cybernetic principles of
VSM to ESB as one of the initial steps towards creation of the
model. The steps are described in greater detail in the following

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sections: Section 2 gives the need for this method; Section 3
defines the model of VESBM; Section 4 provides the results of
the mapping of VSM to ESB; Section 5 explains how the
VESBM is planned to be tested in an Australian governmental
department; and Section 6 concludes the paper with the current
and future research directions.
II. MOTIVATION - THE NEED FOR METHOD
In the era of Cloud, holism in the ESB is important for the
viabilityof service-oriented systems as theyundergo significant
design changes through various evolution stages. This viability
is especially important in times of technological disruptions,
which might lead to possible disintegrations between abstract
business models and their actual service representations, so
affecting the overall Business/IT alignment within the
enterprise. The impact of disruptive technologies on business,
attention to which was initially brought by Bower and
Christensen [22], is one of the most debated topics of the last
decade. It is also the most sensitive topic for business [23],
especially in the scope of Cloud Computing that not only
provides cheap and virtually limitless processing power and
storage [24], but also disrupts the alignment of technology with
business [25].
Cloud Computing is closely correlated with
Service-oriented Computing [26] and SOA is one of its
essential technical foundations [27]. According to the National
Institute of Standards and Technology, the Cloud Computing
has three service models, which are the Software as a Service
(SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure as a
Service (IaaS) [28]. If applied to the common services of
enterprise, described and illustrated earlier (Fig. 1), each
service layer, except Business, will fall into a particular Cloud
Computing service model, such as:
1. The IaaS model – will include the Technology layer, as
it is comprised of virtual machines, load balancers,
network infrastructures, etc.
2. The PaaS model – will include the Data layer, as it is
comprised of databases, web servers, development tools,
etc.
3. The SaaS model – will include the Applications layer, as
it is comprised of email platforms, Customer
Relationship Management (CRM) platforms,
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platforms, etc.
The Business layer, along with other possible services of
enterprise, will fit into the so called Everything as a Service
(EaaS/XaaS) model [29] that is associated with each of the
IaaS, PaaS and SaaS models separately, but also includes
business models, processes, activities and so on. Perhaps the
move towards Business Process Outsourcing is as example of
the extension of the XaaS model.
Cloud Computing led to the development of new computing
paradigms, amongst which are Hybrid Computing of Grid and
Cloud [30], High Performance Computing (HPC) and
Virtualisation in the Cloud [31] and most prominently the
popularised, during the last years, use of Application
Programming Interfaces (API) to connect disparate mobile
platforms through the Cloud by utilisation of external
resources, which empower applications on smartphones and
overcome hardware limitations by partially off-loading their
execution into the Cloud [32], to mention a few [33].
The newest case of using APIs was mainly driven by
technological advancements in smartphones, tablets as well as
social networks and social commerce [34]. It became a basis for
fundamentally new business models and a new type of
economy, known as the API Economy [35]. The impact of API
on global IT market is already visible [34]: 77% of the current
top 50 freeware and top 50 shareware applications are
connected to backend services, whereas 23% are standalone;
APIs are also launched as the core delivery strategy in most
organisations and out of 1000 APIs in global directory 11% are
oriented on mobile platforms, 38% are oriented on non-mobile
platforms and the remaining 51% are shared between the both;
by 2016 the number of public APIs will raise from the current
8,826 to 30,000 and according to the survey conducted by
Layer7 86.5% of organisations will have an API program in
place within 5 years [36].
Currently, the existing research in the domain of service
management is extensively focused on the management service
compositions and various service models, rather than the
management of the middleware infrastructures, such as the
ESB that integrate those services. The importance of
infrastructure management is increasing, especially in the era
of Cloud, as was highlighted by Golden [37]: “... failure to
adopt the infrastructure management practices pioneered by
the large public providers will consign an operations group to
slow, reactive and expensive processes, which are
unacceptable in a world that has embraced automation as a
quotidian practice.”
Infrastructure management is a wide research area in a
variety of IT domains and its challenges are under the spotlight
in a range of seminal works: Sotomayor et al. [38] addressed
the problem of Virtual Infrastructure Management in Private
and Hybrid Clouds through the OpenNebula – an open source,
virtual infrastructure manager that can deploy virtualized
services on a local pool of resources as well as external IaaS
Clouds; Yan et al. [39] introduced the Monsoon – a Cloud
Management System that aimed to address the issue of the
management of complexity of IaaS service model for enterprise
users in Hybrid Cloud environments; Liu et al. [40] proposed
the Multi Cloud Management Platform that aimed to locate
Cloud Users and Cloud Sites and provide Unified Cloud

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Services in the Multi-IaaS Cloud environment; Krintz and
Wolski [41] described the issues in the Unified API
Governance and suggested the solution in the form of a
distributed software platform – the AppScale, which can
manage, unify, deliver, and compose APIs in a commercial
setting. Yet, currentlythere is no model proposed to address the
complexity of management of distinct middleware
infrastructures that drive the service-oriented integration.
III. VIABLE ENTERPRISE SERVICE BUS MODEL
The VESBM is proposed to overcome this challenge. Its
aim is to provide a roadmap for the generation of a
vendor-neutral blueprint for the management of distinct
middleware infrastructures. By providing this blueprint,
VESBM becomes a remedy against risks that may arise in
enterprises that use middleware products from distinct vendors
to integrate IT services. The VESBM is built upon the
cybernetic principles of VSM and the service-oriented
principles of ESB.
VSM is the cybernetic model for designing the control and
communication aspects of a viable system. The VSM was
created by Stafford Beer in 1972 and is fully described in his
trilogy: Brain of the Firm [42], [43], Heart of Enterprise [44]
and Diagnosing the System for Organisations [45]. At the core
of the VSM is the concept of viability that is – a system, which
is “able to maintain a separate existence” [44]. VSM
encompasses a wide range of concepts such as Viability,
Self-reference, Invariance, Recursion, Management of
Complexity, Variety, Homeostasis, Requisite Variety,
Regulation, Regulatory Centre, Resource Bargain,
Accountability, Channel Capacity, Transduction, Oscillation,
Criteria of Variety Relevance, Comparator, Feedback,
Convergence, Autonomy, Meta-system and Algedonic Signals
[45]. All these concepts are built around five key management
functions and one extended function that are Operations,
Co-ordination, Control and Audit (the extension of Control),
Intelligence, and Policy, symbolized in VSM as System ONE,
TWO, THREE and THREE*, FOUR, and FIVE, respectively.
Together, these functions are connected through a series of
information channels and communication flows to form the
VSM, as depicted in the figure below (Fig. 4).
During the last years, the VSM got an increasing attention
from professionals in both industry and academia. It was
adapted in a wide range of quite distinct domains, which
continuously justified its interdisciplinary application
evaluation. The VSM was used: in the creation of a model to
structure a System Dynamics Mapping and Modelling Project
for the Australian Taxation Office [46]; in the development of a
Modelling Framework for Analysis of Viability in Service
Systems [47]; in the business context to develop an Enterprise
Process Architecture [48]; in the creation of the Enterprise
Fig. 4. The VSM of Stafford Beer [45].
Viability Model to extend the Enterprise Architecture
Frameworks for Modelling and Analysing Viability under
Turbulence [49]; as a potential approach for the Enterprise
Architecture Management [50]; as a high-level reference
architecture for complex systems in the development of the
Viable System Architecture [51]; as an approach in mapping
the Enterprise Architecture Principles in The Open Group
Architecture Framework to the cybernetic concepts [52]; as
well as in the creation of the Viable Governance Model – the
theoretical model for the corporate governance of IT [53].
VESBM (Fig. 5) is the symbiosis of ESB and VSM, and
thus shares the features common to both of them. It does not
aim to change the design of existing ESB implementations
available on the market, but to combine them under the
vendor-neutral management umbrella. VESBM does not
describe all of the ESB characteristics, but prescribes the core
set it shall be endowed with to form a viable holistic whole.
Thus, VESBM not only provides a blueprint for management,
but can also help in revealing non-viable aspects in the design
of the Service-oriented-system-in-focus.
By adapting the VSM, VESBM can provide the holistic
model for the management of integration of IT services that are

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Fig. 5. Viable Enterprise Service Bus Model.
continuouslyjustified against their viability to feed the relevant
ITSM frameworks used in organisation (Fig. 6).
VESBM is structured according to the VSM to avoid
possible disintegrations at various levels of Business/IT service
abstractions.
IV. RESULTS
This section provides the results of the mapping of the
cybernetic principles of VSM [45] to ESB [15], starting with
the table below (Table I). This mapping reveals 21 aspects that
need to be realized in the management of ESB and enriches
them with the cybernetic principles of VSM. Where applicable
correlation with ITSM is also provided.
Fig. 6. VESBM feeding the ITSM.
TABLE I. RESULTS OF VSM TO ESB MAPPING (S – SIMILAR, P – PARTIALLY
SIMILAR, X – NON-EXISTENT).
A. Variety, Communication Channels, Preserving Value,
Viability, Self-reference, Invariance, Autonomy (Aspects
1-7)
There is a range of conceptual similarities and differences
between the VSM and the ESB. Both are designed to provide
communication and control means for parts of organisations in
which they are deployed. Both are endowed with
communication channels that are used for information flow.
However, VSM is focused on managerial aspects of a
System-in-focus and the analysis of its states using the variety
as a measure of complexity that counts the number of possible

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states, whereas ESB’s raison d'être is to integrate disparate,
heterogeneous applications using a wide variety of integration
tooling to expose the applications in the form of services. Yet,
one significant difference between VSM and ESB is the
concept of viability that is fundamental to preserving value
created in the System-in-focus, which in the given context is an
integrated IT system.
In the VSM, viability implies separate existence. However,
separate existence is interpreted in the context of autonomythat
the system has in a given environment. Autonomy does not
imply an existence in vacuum, but in the environment that may
consist of other systems, each having a separate identity. The
system is also self-referential, which means that: its logic is
closed-in on itself and each part makes sense precisely in terms
of the other parts; it is self-aware; it maintains its identity; has
facilities for self-repair; and is recursive. The system is
invariant, which means that the system is consistent at any
level of its recursion.
The VESBM derives these VSM principles to create the
foundation for the procedures that would guide the
management of ESB. In the VESBM terms, ESB is treated as a
viable entity within the ITSM scope for the given IT
infrastructure: ESB shall maintain separate existence from
other ESBs; ESB shall be autonomous; Autonomous ESB shall
still interact with other ESBs; ESB shall be self-referential and
its logic shall be closed-in on itself and each of its parts shall
make sense precisely in terms of the other parts; ESB shall be
self-aware; ESB shall have and maintain its identity; ESB shall
have facilities for self-repair; ESB shall be recursive; and the
core ESB structure, defined according to VESBM, shall remain
consistent regardless of the scope it is used in and the
abstraction the VESBM is applied to.
B. System ONE, Recursion (Aspect 8)
VESBM adapts the VSM Recursion to guide the
implementation of incremental ESB integration projects. This
can benefit IT infrastructure with managerial procedures to
form pervasive ESB grids that are capable of spawning across
enterprises, connecting distributed organisational departments,
business units and corporate divisions in both centralised and
decentralised manners.
In the VSM, System ONE is responsible for producing the
viable system (Fig. 4, 5). System ONE of the System-in-focus
forms a set of embedded viable systems. These viable systems
are continuously interacting with the environment that
surrounds them. Thus, none of the instances of the viable
system exists in isolation. System ONE in many ways
resembles the ESB, but its conceptual scope is broader. In the
scope of VSM, subsidiaries, firms and corporations are all
viable entities that contain organisations and are contained
within them. In other words, all of them are the recursions of
the viable system. However, in the VSM recursion does not
imply to loose insertion of one system into another, but to an
absolutely precise definition of viability [45]. Similarly,
depending on the size of organisation, a number of ESBs might
be deployed within IT infrastructure. As with VSM, no ESB
instance is assumed to exist in isolation, same as the
departments, divisions and organisations that operate them.
Usually, ESBs are assigned to particular divisions, but
assignment of one ESB per department could also be a case.
Together, these ESBs can form a grid, which is essentially a
service-oriented environment that interconnects all the ESB
participants into an ecosystem.
Conceptually, an ESB grid is no different to an ESB, yet
their managerial scope is different. VESBM realizes this
difference and can outline managerial procedures to guide the
incremental adaption of ESBs in the environment, as the
abstractions of ESB within IT infrastructure can be handled if
formed according to the recursive structure of VSM.
C. Management of Complexity, Homeostasis, Requisite
Variety (Aspect 9)
VESBM adapts the VSM Homeostasis and Requisite
Variety to assist the ESB management in attenuating and
amplifying the procedures for the ESB capability extension, so
that enough requisite variety is available to deal with the
changes in IT environment and internal states of ESB. This can
benefit the ITSM procedures with additional extensions that
consider the varietyof technologies that can be employed in the
ESB as a response to risks that can arise in IT environment.
In the VSM, variety is a measure of complexity that counts
the number of possible states the System-in-focus can be in. For
the System-in-focus the variety of its environment always
greatly exceeds the variety of operations that serves or exploits
it, which in turn exceeds that of management that regulates or
controls it (Fig. 4, 5). To be able to handle variety the system
shall reach a homeostatic state. Homeostasis is a special state
within a given viable system where all the sub-systems are
responsible for stabilizing its internal environment. To create
acceptable conditions for homeostatic regulation, the Requisite
Variety needs to be restored. The Law of Requisite Variety
states that – only variety can absorb variety [38]. The
restoration is achieved through the deployment of combination
of attenuators and amplifiers that form continuous loops of
variety involvement. VESBM can endow ESB with these
attenuators and amplifiers in the form of relevant regulatory
procedures to restore the variety of technologies employed
within the ESB to acceptable homeostatic conditions, so that it
can adequately respond to changes. Once these conditions are
reached the managerial aspects of ESB can be exploited to
further extend and interface with ITSM framework used in IT
infrastructure.

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D. Regulation Centre (Aspect 10)
VESBM adapts the VSM Regulation Centre to provide
requisite variety of the management of ESB. This can benefit
the alignment of regulatory methods of the lower- and
higher-level service representations (Fig. 6) described within
ITSM framework used in IT infrastructure.
In the VSM, any intervention of Senior Management to
System ONE operations does not lead to Requisite Variety.
Organisations usually employ a range of constraints for variety
proliferation in the form of technologies or methods of
operations. The need for regulation is apparent: “The
management of the System-in-focus, called the Senior
Management, is IN PRINCIPLE unable to entertain the variety
generated by any one (never mind all) of its subsidiary viable
systems that constitute System One” [45]. This statement
implies decentralization and autonomy. Given that the focus is
at services that constitute ESB, which are utilised by the
subsidiaries of the organisation, a special Regulatory Centre
needs to be deployed to amplify managerial variety and
attenuate operational variety of the ESB. Thus, the VESBM
adaption of Regulatory Centre can help in the alignment of
regulatory methods of the lower- and higher-level service
representations described in terms of ITSM, leading to
homeostasis between the management and operations of the
ESB.
E. Resource Bargain, Accountability (Aspect 11)
VESBM adapts the VSM Resource Bargain and
Accountability to guide the allocation of shared resources. This
can benefit IT infrastructure with measures to manage the
performance of resources used by ESB in providing services
with potentially overlapping functionality.
In the VSM, resource allocation, also known as Resource
Bargain, is a dynamic process. It is described as the deal “by
which some degree of autonomy is agreed between the Senior
Management and its junior counterparts” [45]. It is responsible
for the attenuation of possible alternatives as a part of a
homeostatic loop between the management of System ONE and
the Senior Management of the System-in-focus. In VESBM
terms, it means that ESB needs to be endowed with a degree of
autonomy and the Resource Bargain will eventually impose
Accountability for the resources allocated. Accountability shall
be interpreted in terms of variety engineering. In other words,
as it is apparently impossible to monitor all the activities that
are undertaken by ESB, Accountability shall be regarded as the
high variety attenuator of possible outcomes. In conjunction
with the Regulatory Centre, the adaption of Resource Bargain
and Accountability by VESBM can help in defining
management procedures, within the scope of ITSM framework
in use, to mitigate the issues with the responsibility for the use
of resources in the ESB.
F. Channel Capacity, Transduction (Aspect 12)
VESBM adapts the VSM Channel Capacity and
Transduction to add redundancy to messages transmitted
through ESB. This can benefit the ITSM framework used in IT
infrastructure by ensuring that the designed procedures are
defined according to the fully traversed messages.
In the VSM, transduction is responsible for encoding and
decoding messages that have been transmitted through
information channels. Once messages cross the system
boundary, they get transduced so that the senders and receivers
could interpret them. Similarly to VSM, ESB provides data
transformation services at the core of integration strategy. ESB
uses XML as the common data type for messages transmitted,
which can be enriched as required. In the VSM, information
channels are designed with little redundancy to transmit more
information than generated at a given time [45]. Such
redundancy is often necessary for the transmission of messages
that need to be enriched so that the receivers could interpret
them fully. VESBM can define the managerial procedures for
the message exchanges in the ESB according to this
requirement to further contribute to the integrity of ITSM
framework used in IT infrastructure.
G. System TWO/Oscillation (Aspect 13)
VESBM adapts the VSM Anti-oscillation to avoid possible
service performance deterioration during the interaction of
several ESB instances. This can benefit the service match-up
mechanisms used in ESB and described in ITSM.
In the VSM, System TWO is responsible for
Anti-oscillatory activities in the System ONE of the
System-in-focus (Fig. 4, 5). Oscillation is a specific sickness of
homeostasis [45]. It leads towards continuous adjustments of
everySystem ONE instance to everyother one, within the given
system. Because, the process is continuous, such adjustments
may never end, eventually leading to Oscillation. Oscillation
needs to be dumped, as it can lead to the draining of resources,
disintegration and total collapse of the entire system.
System TWO is positioned as the device that aims to
manage possible disintegrations and in the context of ITSM it
can be compared to the team of managers responsible for the
operational level agreements. These are the agreements
between the IT service provider and other parts of the same
organisation, which assist in the provision of services. These
other parts may include departments as well as subsidiaries. In
the scope of the same organisation, all its parts and especially
its subsidiaries may have their own ESBs that are designed to
provide a particular set of services specific to each subsidiary.
Given this perspective, the negotiations that take place during
the formation of agreements can be positioned as the
mechanism to limit the freedom of variety generation in each
subsidiaryand its eventual proliferation in the System-in-focus.

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In VESBM, these negotiations are the Anti-oscillatory
activities that can provide performance measurement and aim
to integrate subsidiaries, in this case through ESBs, under
agreements to assist in providing services to end customers.
H. System THREE/Management and System THREE*/Audit
(Aspect 14)
VESBM adapts the VSM Management and Audit to ensure
that the existing services are operating at expected levels of
performance. This can benefit the alignment of technical
services available in IT infrastructure with generic service
representations described in ITSM framework in use (Fig. 6).
In the VSM, System THREE is associated with the
“here-and-now” daily Management of the organization [45]
(Fig. 4, 5). System THREE has an extension known as Audit
and marked as System THREE*. It is designed to undertake
Audit activities in a sporadic, high variety and
intra-operational manner. The responsibility of System
THREE is to monitor how System TWO operates, whereas
System THREE* is to undertake Audit activities directly upon
the operations of the System ONE.
The activities of System THREE* are defined in terms of
System THREE to restore its Requisite Variety. System
THREE* is designed as the sixth channel within the system
and is defined according to The First Axiom of Management,
which underpins the following equation:
Variety of Audit channel = Total horizontal variety
generated by System One minus Varieties of all other five
channels (1)
In VESBM, this equation (1) means that the Audit channel
can close the gap between the regular service management
activities of ITSM and the irregular ones that take the form of
irregular audits of the performance of services provided
through ESB.
I. Comparator (Aspect 15)
VESBM adapts the VSM Comparator to ensure that
services that constitute abstract service representations are
meeting their purpose (Fig. 6). This can be beneficial in times
when there is a need for the justification of the end results
generated by services against the initial results expected to be
generated by the relevant service representations described in a
broader ITSM scope.
In the VSM, comparison of the declared purpose of the
system against the purpose that is imputed from the results
system delivers is done through a special mechanism known as
a Comparator. The Comparator compares the purpose and the
end results continuouslyand thus prevents ad-hoc workarounds
when the purpose deviates from what has been declared. It is
common for the purpose to be declared at higher-levels of
recursion, but then morph at lower-levels, as it gets transduced.
Thus, it is natural for systems to take actions based on their
interpretations of the declared purpose. This might change
their initial states to the resultant ones and eventually lead to
possible disequilibrium in the system. In VESBM, the
Comparator can be used in designing managerial procedures
that will prevent similar issues in the ESB management in
times when services that supposed to implement particular
functionality, deviate from it by either encompassing broader
functionality or cutting it down to a narrow one.
J. Feedback (Aspect 16)
VESBM adapts the VSM Feedback as a complementary to
the Comparator to guide the modification of purposes.
In the VSM, the Feedback mechanism, in conjunction with
the Comparator, is used to drive the modification of the purpose
of the system according to error signals received. In viable
systems, a possible disequilibrium between the System-in-focus
and the next tier systems can be avoided through corrective
actions that converge the purposes the systems declare and thus
bring them to compromise. In VESBM, Feedback can be used
to define the procedures for error signaling to further extend
and interface with ITSM framework used in IT infrastructure.
K. Convergence (Aspect 17)
VESBM adapts the VSM purpose Convergence to equalize
the purposes of abstract service representations with the
purposes of technical services that constitute them (Fig. 6).
This activity can be beneficial in avoiding possible
disintegrations of technical services with their actual service
representations in times of modifications that are conducted at
a broader ITSM scope.
In the VSM, convergence of purposes is a continuous
process that is natural to the system. Because viable entities of
the system are supposed to operate with a defined degree of
freedom, possible disequilibrium of purposes of higher-level
recursions with that of lower-level ones is accepted. However,
as viable systems of the System-in-focus are supposed to have a
separate existence, the difference in purposes is allowed as long
as it does not leave the spectrum of overall cohesiveness of the
System-in-focus. In VESBM, Convergence can be used to
guide the alignment of services integrated through ESB, with
the services described in a broader ITSM context.
L. System FOUR/Self-awareness (Aspect 18)
VESBM adapts the VSM Self-awareness to drive the
integration strategy of future services that are external to the IT
infrastructure and maintain the quality of service performance.
This can benefit the process of choosing potential service
candidates that might be needed as a part of ITSM strategy, but
not be available in ESB.

ISSN (Print): 2204-0595
In the VSM, System FOUR is responsible for providing
Self-awareness for the System-in-focus (Fig. 4, 5). It is
concerned with the management of outside-and-then of the
system, and is in continuous interaction with external
environment. In the ESB, the external environment includes
services external to its ecosystem that can be found through the
Universal Description Discovery and Integration (UDDI) or
similar service directories. At a technical level ESB is already
aware of inside-and-now as well as outside, but not necessarily
-then.
What it misses is the managerial approach for the
outside-and-then that would conceptually equalize it to the
ITSM framework used in IT infrastructure. In the context of
ITSM, System FOUR can be compared to the team of managers
that is responsible for the Service Strategy, as espoused in ITIL
[3]. It involves in-depth analysis of the environment prior to the
Service Design phase. However, System FOUR is also endowed
with a number of channels that aim to satisfy the common area
of interests. Each area has dedicated Alpha and Beta loops.
Both loops are comprised of Amplification and Attenuation
channels.
In VESBM, Alpha loop takes the responsibility for the
continuous monitoring of services that are potential candidates
for integration through ESB. Its Alpha Amplifier is responsible
for the continuous projection of the internal ESB service
ecosystem to the external ones to identify the space of service
relevance. Its Alpha Attenuator is responsible for the
continuous proactive observation of the service relevance to
avoid the waiting attitude for any potential service candidate
appearance in the external environment. The Alpha loop does
not consider services separately in each particular service
directory (e.g., UDDI), but monitors the intersection of all the
services in all the directories monitored (Fig. 4, 5). All of this is
applicable to the Beta loop, with only one remark that the
external environment of which it is concerned is of unknown
future.
Purelymonitoring activities can be implemented in the ESB
through the deployment of services that would monitor service
directories that are of interest. However, the Alpha and Beta
channels in the VESBM also involve quality analysis that can
enrich the monitoring with additional procedures, which in
turn can influence the management of services within ITSM
framework used in IT infrastructure.
M. System FIVE/Ethos (Aspect 19)
VESBM adapts the VSM Ethos to steer the services
provided through ESB in the unknown, future and dynamically
changing environment. This steering can benefit the process of
creation of new, decommission of old and modification of
existing services of IT infrastructure that are described in the
scope of ITSM.
In the VSM, System FIVE is responsible for creating
corporate ethos of the System-in-focus (Fig. 4, 5). Ethos is
responsible for creating flexible atmosphere, instead of rigid set
of objectives, to act as the “variety sponge of gigantic capacity”
[45]. It is the logical closure of the VSM, the point of
self-reference, where no more systems are placed above at a
given level of recursion and where the identity is completely
asserted.
In the context of ITSM, System FIVE can be compared to
the team of managers that influences the course of IT
infrastructure. In the VSM, System FIVE defines the rules that
determine the criteria of relevance for the patterns that need to
be recognised by System FOUR and filtered from less relevant
ones in the unknown space of continuously changing future. In
VESBM, these rules can be seen as service specifications that
dictate what type of technology needs to be considered within
ESB. Apparently, in some situations a particular technology
might not be available, though the scope it will be operating in
is known. Thus, the adaption of Ethos by VESBM can create
the awareness of what kind of business requirements need to be
met through the ESB service compositions as well as what kind
of patterns of services and technologies need to be considered to
implement these requirements.
N. Meta-system (Aspect 20)
VESBM adapts the VSM Third Axiom of Management and
the Law of Cohesion to extend the meta-systemic scope of ESB.
This can benefit the management of multiple ESB recursions
through ITSM framework used in IT infrastructure.
In the VSM, a meta-system is a system that is over and
beyond a system of lower logical order to which higher-level
authority might not be applied. The Third Axiom of
Management states that: “The variety disposed by System FIVE
equals the residual variety generated by the operation of the
Second Axiom.” Residual does not imply to small, but anything
leftover, which mayalso be considerablylarge. In VESBM, this
means that there would be potential service candidates, which
might be suspended for integration through ESB at a given
time. Though, their functionality might be required for the
execution of service representations that are part of business
models, the residual variety implies to the need for actions that
must be taken by the senior management prior such
integrations take place. To apply this equally to more abstract
service candidates, such as multiple ESB instances in IT
infrastructures, the Law of Cohesion must be adapted: “The
System One variety accessible to System Three of Recursion x
equals the variety disposed by the sum of the meta-systems of
Recursion y for every recursive pair.” This statement is a
generic interpretation of the First Axiom of Management,
which implies the applicability of an ITSM framework not only
to services, but also to ESBs that integrate them in IT

ISSN (Print): 2204-0595
infrastructure.
O. Algedonic Signals (Aspect 21)
VESBM adapts the VSM Algedonic Signals for the crisis
signaling capability purposes. This can benefit the
management of asynchronous events that take place in ESB
and because of time bias not realized in the ITSM used in IT
infrastructure.
In the VSM, System FIVE is prone to occupational hazards
that can put it in a somnolent state. As in ESB, System FIVE
mayaccidentallyignore particular events, because all the filters
on the main axis may drown the entire system. Thus, System
FIVE might just ‘fall asleep’ and ignore the events that require
attention. To wake up the system VSM employs a special alarm
signal, known as Algedonic (stands for both pain and
pleasure), which performs non-analytical regulation in the
viable system. It divides the signals ascending from System
ONE, which enter meta-systemic filtrations and uses its own
Algedonic filter to decide whether the System FIVE shall be
alerted or not. VESBM adapts the Alegodnic Signal to define
procedures that undertake two roles: at the managerial level
they solve the time bias problem of asynchronous events
management, through the employment of procedures that
would identify services that are either operating improperly or
require close attention prior next use in the business process
automation; at the technical level they are supported by
automated events management services present in ESBs, so
that the system can be woken up to pay attention to a particular
event in the pool. These procedures can then be aligned with
ITSM framework to further contribute to the integrity of IT
infrastructure.
V. EXPERIMENTAL SETTING
The VESBM current research application is within an
Australian governmental department that includes a case study
of adaption of VESBM to the ITSM practices to identify the
managerial gaps in the services that are integrated within the
organisation’s infrastructure and extend them as required. The
experiment is comprised of five stages:
1. Analyzing existing ITSM frameworks used in
organisation (e.g. ITIL, COBIT, customised, etc.) to
identify the managerial procedures
2. Mapping the VESBM to the ITSM framework to reveal
the gaps in the procedures
3. Extending the ITSM framework through VESBM
according to the gaps identified
4. Running the VESBM-enabled ITSM framework in the
practical setting
5. Awaiting for feedback on the use of VESBM for the
ITSM
Once the experiment is conducted and the feedback is
received, the VESBM enrichment of ITSM framework can
undergo additional iterations until the framework meets the
levels that satisfy the service management requirements.
VI. CONCLUSION
This paper provided the results of the mapping of the
cybernetic principles of VSM to ESB. This mapping is one of
the steps towards creation of the model of VESBM that aims to
become a roadmap for the generation of a vendor-neutral
blueprint for the management of distinct middleware
infrastructures, such as the ESBs, which drive the integration
of the services that form the IT infrastructure. VESBM is the
result of the symbiosis of the cybernetic model of VSM and the
service-oriented model of ESB. The need for VESBM is
especially actualized in the era of Cloud. VESBM aims to fill a
specific niche by combining distinct ESB implementations
available on the market under the managerial umbrella of
VSM, without compromising their design.
The goal of this experiment was to identify gaps and extend
the management principles of service-oriented integration with
design propositions based on the principles of cybernetics. It
provides a solid foundation for future research as the model can
be combined with decision support systems, work systems,
service management methodologies and other best practices
that can aid the management of complex service-oriented
integration projects.
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