Enterprise Design Engineering - Fundamentals

A New Era for Business Management - The Roadmap From Business Operators to Enterprise Designers


What you'll learn
What is the overall structure of a business
What is the digitization of a business
The information theory that supports the model of a business
Understand career development

Requirements
How Business Works

Description
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 with 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 encounter 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 one 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.
When it comes to decision making process, we have a craftsmanship approach. The executive team will be guided by few best business practices, experience, intuition, and skills. There is no measurement either. All business reports reflect the outcome only. The entire debate about the best way forward that happens 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 business.
The limitations of the using the
case method
in managing the business are extended to another 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
.
Another area that needs a lot of help, and where best business practices are widely used, is the talent development and career planning.
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 or aircraft engineers are starting the design with a large footprint of scientific knowledge. We are talking about physics, 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 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 information messages has another attribute 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 make 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 business processes, one for employee, and one for enterprise software and 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
Visual Resume
. The third area has a new project management method that extends the traditional Waterfall to information-centric projects.
To make it easier for the student to learn about this new approach, we are also introducing few practical examples of using the enterprise design engineering design in practice. These examples cover business management, enterprise software, talent development, and management consulting.

What you'll learn
This course introduces for the first time a
scientific approach
to all areas in a business where information-processing is at the core of their operations. That 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 the 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.
Who this course is for
The answer to this question is simple. This course is everyone that works with information-processing organizations. They can be businesses, investors, government organizations, and even military operations.
One "course" to rule them all
With these new introductions, this course in enterprise design engineering covers the entire enterprise and its relationship with environment. This is a "course" that rules all the other courses when it comes to all areas of a business.
Who this course is for:
IT Professionals
Business Managers
Management Consultants
Enterprise Architects
Engineers

More Info