A large part of its power comes
from its ability to evolve, and this in turn stems from its being close to the users
352 DSM DEFINITION PROCESS
and needing to support only a bounded domain and set of users. As the domain
evolves and the group of users grows, you will face again the questions of where to
draw the boundary, what to include, and what to leave out. You will also face the
question of evolution in your organization: ?¬?tting the needs of the organization
with the desires of the people who make up that organization. Finally, there is the
question of the fate of an individual DSM project: what happens at the far end of the
life cycle.
13.7.1 Evolutionary Forces
Evolution in human organizations works best when it can ?¬?nd the right balance
between change and continuity. At one extreme, the DSM solution could change so
fast that nobody could keep up, or split into a myriad of languages, each for too narrow
a group. At the other extreme, the DSM solution could stagnate, either not being
maintained or because users do not update to newer versions. Most of the dangers here
are obvious, but we will pick out a few to look at.
Here, we have mostly assumed a single DSM solution, a single group of users, and
a single version of the DSM solution in use at a time. In reality, there may be pressure
to have different variants of the DSM solution for different groups of users.
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