Enterprise Design Engineering - Fundamentals

Intro

In an article from 1998 called "Designing the Future", Jay W. Forrester, a former MIT professor and the father of System Dynamics made a statement about the future of business schools:  "Several decades of progress in system dynamics point to a new kind of management education. Such a future education will train a new kind of manager for the future. I anticipate future management schools devoted to enterprise design. Such business schools would train enterprise designers."

Jay used the following argument in support of his prediction:  "The difference between present management schools and those in the future will be as great as the difference between a trade school that trains airplane pilots and a university engineering department that trains aircraft engineers. Pilots will continue to be needed, So also, operating managers will be needed. However, just as successful aircraft are possible only through skilled designers, so in the future will successful corporations, countries, and social systems be possible through enterprise designers."

This forward thinking by Jay Forrester was the inspiration for this course. This course introduces for the first time a complete and comprehensive approach to the enterprise design field.

Easier said than done

Because of the name design, a credible approach is possible only if we use the engineering approach in designing various enterprise components. And this is where we are encountering many challenges.

Let's compare the designing of a plane with millions of parts by a team of aircraft engineers, with making a strategic decision by a top executive team.

In the first case, the entire process is backed down by two elements. One element is the scientific knowledge, and the other one is the ability to measure and calculate almost every aspect related to the plane operations. On top of this there is a large collection of pre-packaged scientific knowledge in the form of standards, existing pre-built components such as electrical motors, hydraulic systems, etc., existing certifications procedures, and so on. They are making the design process shorter by decades.

When it comes to the decision making process, we have the craftsmanship approach. The executive team will be guided by a few best business practices, experience, intuition, and skills. There is no measurement either. All business reports used in the decision process reflect the outcome only. The entire debate about the best way forward in the decision making process used in the corner office looks very similar with the one invented by Socrates and the Greeks over 2500 years ago. In fact, the Socratic method was the inspiration for the case method adopted by the Harvard School of Law in 1870s, and which "has since been adopted by schools in other disciplines, such as business, public policy, ad education." [Source: Wikipedia]

In 1921 case method was adopted by Harvard School of Business, which recently celebrated 100-year anniversary. Currently, there are an estimated 13,000 business schools, and all of them are placing the case method at the core of their education approach to the business management.

Unfortunately, the use of this 2500 year old method doesn't stop with the corner office. The limitations of using the case method in managing the business are extended to another key area of the enterprise, which is the design of software for the enterprise. In this scenario, the business requirements are translated in use cases, before they are used to design the enterprise software application. This is because the use cases are another version of the case method.

As a consequence, there is another area that needs a lot of help, and where the best business practices are widely used. This is the field of talent development and career planning. An engineer career planning follows a simple path, which is accumulation of more scientific knowledge, more experience with multi-disciplinary complex designs, and more experience with different integration solutions. Both business management and software development for the enterprise is solely based on best business practices, experience, and intuition. What happens if a new collection of best business practices are replacing the previous one? In that case you need to restart your efforts to build your professional career and adopt a new plan. For instance, when Java language and platform was introduced in the design of enterprise applications, almost everything you knew from the previous experience became obsolete.

Needless to say, but the two approaches of case method and engineering are not compatible at all.

Processing information is the main target for the enterprise design

To understand what it takes to design various elements of the enterprise, we need to start with the basics of engineering. Going back to the airplane example, the team of aircraft engineers are starting the design with a large footprint of scientific knowledge. We are talking about physics, thermodynamics, chemistry, materials science, fluid mechanics, control theory, and many more. Next, they have a access to a wide range of pre-built components such as physical devices, standards, certifications, quality assessments and technology procedures. All of them are validated by the extensive use of scientific knowledge. The entire plane design follows the traditional Waterfall method. All these three steps are at the core of the engineering knowledge stack.

Going back to the enterprise design, the target is to design components from the business management, enterprise software applications, and talent development. If we have to mirror the traditional engineering knowledge stack, the enterprise designer engineer has to start with a complete and comprehensive information theory, a set of pre-built components ready to use that are based on the information theory, and a practical method that can be applied with success to information-centric type of projects.

Before we are jumping to make the enterprise design approach a true engineering one, it is important to know that currently there is no complete and comprehensive information theory we can use it in practice.

This course introduces many new concepts, like a new theory of information

From the previous section we draw one important conclusion. There is no way we can make the new field of enterprise design practical, without a new theory of information.

The one we currently have, was introduced in 1948 by Claude Shannon and it covers only the physical aspect of a message exchange. Shannon, in his famous paper called A Mathematical Theory of Communication highlighted that all information messages have another attribute which he called it semantic, and that his theory does not apply to its processing.

However, all three enterprise areas, business management, enterprise software, and talent management, are mainly operating around processing the semantic attributes of messages exchanged.

We mentioned before that one of the areas where airplane designers have a lot of help is from the availability of pre-built components. All of them are designed based on scientific knowledge, which makes it easier to be trusted. This is not true for the design of the enterprise software. Alan Kay, when it comes to software programming, said it best: "Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves." The end result is that all enterprise software applications are designed and built using recipe-like solutions. These recipes are only the result of experience and intuition.

In conclusion, to claim that this course of enterprise design is a true field of engineering, we are introducing three new areas of knowledge. The first area is a new theory of information called Physics of Information. The second area has three new pre-built components, one for all business processes, one for employee, and one for the enterprise software and its automation. The three pre-built components are called the Business Genome Map, the Dynamically Stable Enterprise, and the Visual Skill Map. Each one of these components have a derived form. They are called, Information Stores and Enterprise Information Highways Network, Fly-by-Wire Enterprise, and the Visual Resume. The third area has a new project management method that extends the traditional Waterfall to all information-centric projects.

To make it easier for the student to learn about this new approach, we are also introducing a few practical examples of using the enterprise design engineering design in practice.  These examples cover business management, the development of enterprise software, talent development, and management consulting.

What you'll learn

This course introduces for the first time a scientific approach to all areas of a business where information-processing is at the core of their operations.  This implies learning about the new information and viable system theory, about the way business internal operations can be modeled using this new theory, and how you can use this knowledge in various projects.

The main advantage of becoming an enterprise designer is in not only that it allows you to design solution orders of magnitude faster, but also to have the confidence that they are backed by a solid scientific theory.

Are there any course requirements or prerequisites?

This course is the first one that introduces this new field of enterprise design. To understand the course requirements we need to go back to the comparison between an airplane pilot and an airplane designer.  There is a lot of knowledge on how the business operates in the area of management, enterprise software, talent development, and career planning. If you are somewhat familiar with them it will be much easier to understand the concepts presented. For a more advanced understanding, knowledge in Physics becomes very useful.

As an author I can guarantee that this course, while it is quite complex, it is complete. There are no areas of the enterprise design engineering that are not covered by this course. There are future courses planned to go into more details, but all the fundamentals are covered by this course.

Who this course is for

The answer to this question is simple. This course is for everyone that works with information-processing organizations. They can be businesses, investors, government organizations, and even military operations.

One "course" to rule them all

To conclude this introduction, this course in enterprise design engineering covers the entire enterprise and its relationship with its environment. This is a "course" that rules all the other courses when it comes to all areas of a business.