Philip Boxer

Enterprise architecture for complex system-of-systems contexts

An enterprise architecture is an accepted, widely used means for an organization to capture the relationship of its business operations to the systems and data that support them. Increasingly, enterprises are participating in complex system-of-systems contexts in order to meet changing customer demands that require them to collaborate with other enterprises in new and innovative ways. For a complex system-of-systems context, a shortcoming of enterprise architecture is that it presumes a single enterprise or a single, ultimate source of control. This paper explores an approach to reasoning about distributed collaboration in the complex system-of-systems, multi-enterprise context, in which this single, ultimate source of control does not exist. It outlines the ways in which the long-used Zachman Framework for enterprise architecture would need to be modified to account for multi-enterprise collaboration and decentralized governance. It proposes a concept of stratification to meet this need and puts forward the main characteristics of the methods needed to model the stratified relationships of complex systems-of-systems to their contexts-of-use.

Doing time. The emergence of irreversibility

Abstract: By considering an enterprise to be a system of agents that observe and construct theories about themselves immediately raises issues of closure. These in turn pose questions about the identity and evolution of that which is exhibiting such closure. We address these questions by assigning enterprises to a class of systems whose models are triply articulated. The existential articulation provides an account of the possible behaviors of the enterprises agents and of their interoperation. The referential articulation specifies outcomes that its agents are required to satisfy. The deontic articulation imposes constraints on the composition of the other two articulations that are sufficient to ensure that the enterprise effectively implements its specified requirements. Any of these articulations may be under‐determined in that they admit more than one elaboration. The behavioral closure of an enterprise is a kind of composition (formally, a category theoretic limit construction) of its three articulations. If the enterprise is its own observer, then the articulations are its models of itself. The enterprise has many opportunities for error in constructing this model. In particular, it may find that it cannot choose among its under‐determined articulations in such a way that their composition is internally consistent. Such errors necessitate changes to its model, which may be denoted as steps in an irreversible trajectory through a space of such models. This approach seems to provide a conceptual bridge across the gulf between systems theory and psychoanalysis, and has provided valuable insights into strategy formulation within large enterprises.

Analysing the lack of Demand Organisation

We seek to develop means of intervention in Enterprises that will enable them to react in an effective, sustainable and timely fashion to changes in the ways that markets and demand are organized; that is, to act strategically. We take an enterprise to be some entity that seeks to provide its clients with services that they value while maintaining its ability to do so in the face of changes in the demands of its clients and in the resources at its disposal. The services that clients value form around what the organization of their demands lack. The concept of strategy therefore rests on critically evaluating the ontology and semantics of the Enterprise in relation to these holes in demand organization. We access ontology and semantics by constructing and manipulating hypothetical, first-order, mathematical models of the Enterprise’s services and of its value-adding processes. Because an enterprise is an anticipatory system, its semantic domain must include representations of the enterprise’s model of itse...

The impact of governance approaches on SoS environments

Governments worldwide are turning to Information and Communication Technology (ICT) based systems of systems, commonly termed Electronic Government (eGovernment), to enable more timely, efficient and effective interaction with their citizens and with the business community. Citizens and businesses have dynamic and evolving demands related to the complexity of their lives and operational environments, respectively. A major challenge for government is to be able to understand the value derived from investment in eGovernment in order to improve its consequent ability to respond to the variety of demands of its citizens and businesses. To be able to understand the value derived from planned investments in eGovernment, their analysis needs to extend beyond the familiar approaches that address economies of scale and scope to encompass economies of alignment. These economies of alignment arise from being able to reduce the costs of the multiple forms of collaboration needing to be supported by systems of systems in providing greater responsiveness.

Building organizational agility into large-scale software-reliant environments

The tempo at which an enterprise creates new uses for its systems is different from that of its acquisition or systems development processes. The military continues to confront the issue of how fielded systems can support the agility needed by its deployed forces. This problem of diverging tempos applies to a variety of large-scale, software-reliant enterprises.such as those found in healthcare and digital communications. This paper posits four realities underpinning an approach to this problem space: the governance-demand double challenge, edge-driven perspective, stratification, and demand cohesion. It uses a particular case example to show how these concepts support the modeling and analysis of the enterprise as a socio-technical system of systems. The paper argues that analyses based on this approach are necessary for making this problem space tractable.

Tutorial 1: Modeling Key Dynamics in Complex Systems (of Systems) Environments: Foundational Concepts

The transition from systems that provide a pre-defined product to ongoing relationships that focus on supporting dynamically changing customer needs over time is moving suppliers from a product-delivery mode to one in which through-life capability management is expected. Appropriately modeling both supply and demand provides participants in this context with a richer understanding of risks and risk mitigations associated with their delivery strategy. This tutorial presents foundational concepts for modeling approaches along with a number of modeling techniques that address different aspects of customer-supplier relationships in dynamic environments.