Systems Thinking — Parasitic Systems

While defence of systems mostly looks at specific attacks at your resources and systems themselves there is something to look for as a part of both your design and maintenance operations beyond that.

In a way you could also see it as an opimisation to look for and defend against or eliminate parasitic systems.

Parasitic systems are ones that use your resources for their own outcomes without providing benefit to your own intended outcomes.

So as long as your outcomes include things not directly in your control or difficult to measure but to benefit others, such as improving things for your community or contributing to society then use of your resources in these cases is not parasitic. It’s when they neither provide benefit to you nor your intentions to help specified others in some way that it’s truly unneeded and should be eliminated where possible.

It could be something like using a particular tool and getting signed up to a service you never use that charges you a subscription fee. Now the parasitic system isn’t necessarily intended to be malicious in all cases as is the example here but the effect is the same nonetheless in taking from your resources for no benefit, and no loss in eliminating it. It’s why it’s similar to finding ways to optimise, the difference between optimisation is instead of improving efficiency this is about eliminating losses (which in itself contributes to hidden inefficiencies).

The best way to approach identifying parasitic systems is to track the resources a system uses. This means all types of resources, whether it’s money, time, personal energy or electricity. Quantify what you can and where it’s being used.

If there are losses where there don’t need to be it could be either inefficiency in the system to be improved or a parasitic system to be eliminated or cut off.

Read this post and more on my Typeshare Social Blog