Abstract

Modern day organisations are constantly in motion. This motion might be the result of top-down initiated transformations, e.g. resulting from strategy changes, new regulations, innovation of products and services, etc. However, next to top-down changes, an organisation also involves a myriad of smaller changes that emerge bottom-up. Work processes are changed slightly (if only to “make things work”). People start using social media and cloud based services as part of their work processes. Etc. This poses senior management of an organisation with the difficult task to best steward such changes. They need to steer, or rather steward, an enterprise that is inherently in motion.

From a system theoretic perspective, one might argue that modern day organisations truly need to be self-creating. They must have autopoiesis. Of course, there is a need to have some level (just enough) of control over the initiation and direction of changes, including the need to manage e.g. risks and compliance. This implies the need for managed organisational self-creation.

In this presentation we will specifically explore how Business Informatics as a field of research can enable managed autopoiesis in organisations. We will discuss the potential role of IT towards the support of organisational self-creation, as well as the management of this self-creation. In doing so, we will also position existing concepts such as enterprise architecture management, enterprise engineering, enterprise modelling, business process modelling and business process management.

Short Bio

Prof.dr. Henderik A. Proper, Erik to friends, is a senior research manager at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology, where he leads the Enterprise Engineering research team. He also holds a chair in Information Systems at the Radboud University in the Netherlands.

Erik is driven by the desire to create theories that work. Therefore, he has always mixed his work in academia with work in industry, by working for consultancy firms. He co-authored two books on enterprise architecture, and provided substantial contributions to two other books on this topic. Erik is one of the co-initiators of the development of the ArchiMate language for Enterprise Architecture. He is also an editor in-chief of a book series on Enterprise Engineering, published by Springer.