About me

My name is Vasile Coman and I am the founder of XCLNav Academy. This organization targets the Enterprise Design Engineering field. The idea of an enterprise design as a profession has been suggested by Jay Forrester in his paper 'Designing the Future' [1998]. Jay is a former MIT professor and the inventor of system dynamics. This field main goal is the introduction of a true engineering approach into all aspects of the business - operations, management, IT, and career development.

Throughout my career of over three decades I worked both as an IT expert in multiple roles and as a management consultant. The number of companies I worked for is over 100.

About the Topic of Enterprise Design

There is no true engineering without science, and that applies to the enterprise design too. The information theory and the science associated with the enterprise design field introduced by this course - Physics of Information -  have been developed during the last three decades. During this time a few of the theoretical concepts have also been introduced in papers presented at prestigious international conferences [NECSI, AAAI, TePRA].  While understanding these concepts would be beneficial, it is not entirely necessary to learn them in order to apply them in practice. One goal of this course is to introduce a few frameworks that will combine these concepts in an easy to apply in practice methodologies. However, if you want to go deeper into how these frameworks were developed we added that knowledge to the course.

Few Breakthrough Concepts Introduced

There are few topics where this course is introducing a fresh perspective. I will mention here only three of them.

The first topic is on a new approach to business management. It is hard to believe that the case method used in all MBAs programs is not only over 150 years old, but it was inspired by Socratic method which is 2500 years old!  This was adopted by Harvard Business School a hundred year ago and it is still the cornerstone for its learning process together with other 13,000 MBA programs worldwide.

The second topic is on a new approach to the development of enterprise software. When comes to software development Alan Kay 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 third topic is on the hype that surrounds new fields like the AI, ML and their promises. There is a major problem with the way they are promoted, while there are missing basic knowledge and definitions. For instance, John McCarty, who coined the term AI, said not too long ago that our understanding of AI is missing basic ideas. As a consequence, what we know so far is not sufficient to reach human-level intelligence. He mentioned 'one of the big things [missing] was the recognition that computers would have to do non-monotonic reasoning' to be considered intelligent.

This course makes an effort to address all these topics from the scientific viewpoint and a lot more.

Important Message

Fair Warning. While taking the course doesn't require a lot of prerequisite knowledge, it asks for a consistent great effort to learn various concepts and how they are applied in practice. The main benefit from all this effort is simple. As in a true engineering methodology, each type of project found in a business, regardless of its areas of needs or target, has an associated unique, standardized workflow that will apply regardless of the business type, business size, its model, or strategic focus. To use an analogy, a team of engineers tasked to design and build a bridge will use the same standardized approach regardless of the type, size, or the location where the bridge will be constructed. In a similar way, a team of enterprise design engineers will have at their disposal a set of standardized workflows associated with solving problems in business operations, management, information technology, or career development.

Education

MS In Aeronautics.