Organisational Design & Enterprise Engineering -Two sides of the same coin?

Abstract

Change is a constant for most contemporary organisations, whether it is initiated top-down, or it emerges bottom-up. One could even say that organisations are continuously in motion. Dealing with change in organisations can be approached from many different vantage points. In this presentation, we investigate two of these vantage points, while also trying to bridge between them. More specifically, we will look at Organisational Design, originating from social sciences, and Enterprise Engineering, originating from engineering sciences.Organisational Design considers organisations as the result of social interactions between (human) actors. By way of this interaction, the actors define and shape the organisation. This could, indeed, happen in a directive / top-down style, as well as in a more open / bottom-up style. Even more, 'top-down' decisions made by a few, might not actually be institutionalised by the many that may be effected by these decisions.Enterprise Engineering, also referred to as Organisational Engineering or Business Engineering, includes domains such as Business Process Management and Enterprise Architecture. It extrapolates from Software Engineering via Information Systems Engineering, to the engineering of organisations and their enterprises. The core tenet of Enterprise Engineering is to treat enterprises as purposefully designed artefacts. This may seem natural from an engineering point of view. But do organisations, being made up primarily from humans, behave rationally? Can organisations be engineered at all? Does the extrapolation hold?Organisational Design and Enterprise Engineering look at change in organisations from two different perspectives. Each perspective has a potential added value when dealing with change in organisations. They could be regarded as two sides of the same coin; the coin of organisational change. Or are they so different that we should really see them as different sides of different coins?In this presentation we will explore the tension between Organisational Design and Enterprise Engineering further, as well as the need / benefits of combining the two. In doing so, we will also consider the role of enterprise models as potential boundary objects between the social processes from an Organisational Design perspective, and the rationality-driven Enterprise Engineering processes. We suggest enterprise models as a possible way keep to ensure that the two sides of the coin are indeed two sides of the same coin.