Marching” into the Real-Time AI Management Era

This paper adapts the vintage Jim March Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice (cf. March and Olsen, 1976) to 2020 and the real-time AI management era and further theorizes with the benefit of the Jim March perspective. Our interest in real-time management of AI stems from previous studies with the Institute for Communications Technology Management at USC in 2016/2017 which included a survey of 1000+ senior managers in the US and interviews with managers in the US and Denmark. We focused on how managers cognitively relate to real-time and real-time management in organizations (Rydén & El Sawy, 2019a, b)1 and discovered a “Fast & Flow” phenomenon for real-time management. We realized that this phenomenon had implications for agile decision-making in real-time digital contexts enhanced by AI. We take a descriptive rhythmic view on organizational decision-making in a real-time digital context of a platform-based healthcare project enhanced by AI (see box below) in order to understand relationships between organizational decision-making and behavioral dynamics and to integrate these at the interface of the technology and human domains. From this theorizing, we are developing a rhythmic ontology for AI deployment in real-time contexts. We find that what we are learning from this articulation with a rhythmic perspective better illuminates what is going well and what is going badly in this organizational/digital setup. This will help us to identify prescriptive fixes with Fast & Flow to improve the performance of the organization and patient well-being.