In the last decades there has been a great change in information and communication technologies, particularly following the advent and proliferation of Internet. These changes have to a large extent transformed the way in which firms operate and compete. They have generated new business opportunities as well as giving rise to improvements in productivity Some of the schools belonging to the field of Systems Thinking have benefited from these new tools whilst others have not, at least to a sufficient degree.
We believe this to be the case of theOrganisational Cybernetics of S. Beer (Perez Rios, 2006b).

Over more than decade we have been developing at the University of Valladolid, within the Systems Thinking Group, under the direction of Dr. José Pérez Ríos, software tools aimed at facilitating the application of diverse systems methodologies and among these Organisational Cybernetics. More specifically, in this area we have created software tools that enable us to apply the Viable Systems Model to the diagnosis and design of organizations.

The number and variety of VSM applications for both diagnosing and designing organisations have grown considerably since it was created (Espejo and Harnden, 1989, and Schwaninger and Pérez Ríos, 2008b).

The possibility afforded by the VSM for analysing a problem from various points of view, by selecting different criteria and levels of recursion, is a very powerful and important characteristic of the model. Its capacity for travelling vertically through several dimensions allows it to identify the recursion levels that reflect the means whereby an organisation attempts to deal with the complexity of the environment in which it operates.
However, this analytical potential also implies an increase in the model’s complexity. If we employ different criteria and recursion levels, the number of elements to be taken into consideration grows very rapidly.
For each level of recursion there should likewise be identification of the complete set of systems/functions (System 1, System 2s, System 3, System 3*, System 4 and System 5), communication channels (including the algedonic channel), transducers, environments, relations between the environments, relations between the elements of System 1, as well as of all the information components pertinent to each of these.
As a consequence, the task of identifying each component and the registering of corresponding information is rather a complex one, and is compounded by the difficulty of maintaining control of the place we are in at any time of the study.

One of the reasons for creating VSMod® (Pérez Ríos, 2003; 2005; 2006a; 2006b; 2007a; 2007b; 2008a; 2008b; 2009 and 2010) was precisely that of facilitating such a task.