suboptimering

Suboptimering, in management and systems theory, refers to a situation where optimizing an individual part of a system does not lead to the best possible outcome for the system as a whole. It occurs when subsystems pursue their own objectives, or when information is incomplete or incentives are misaligned, so local improvements generate negative effects elsewhere in the system.

The concept appears across disciplines, including operations management, software engineering, and public administration. Examples include a manufacturing organization where each department minimizes its own costs but reduces overall throughput; a software system where a component improves its own response time through caching or precomputation, at the expense of memory usage or cache coherence elsewhere; or a supply chain where separate entities optimize their margins without regard to total delivery time or total costs.

Causes of suboptimering often involve misaligned goals, fragmented information, conflicting performance metrics, or decentralization of decision-making. When units optimize for locally defined targets rather than a shared system objective, improvements in one area can create bottlenecks, delays, or higher total costs in another.

Mitigation strategies aim to align incentives and information with system-wide goals. Approaches include defining a unified or multi-objective objective, using system-level metrics, coordinating through cross-functional teams, and employing hierarchical or coordinated optimization that preserves local autonomy while constraining it within global objectives. Effective suboptimization management often relies on transparent communication, integrated planning, and feedback loops that keep local decisions aligned with overall performance.