Welcome to this overview of my ongoing research on Enterprise Architecture.
The title of this website is ECM3, please read about this in my personal motivation. Next to this motivation, the ECM acronym is the framework of my research on the subject and profession of Enterprise Architecture.
ECM as in Enterprise [Coherence, Complexity] [Maturity, Model, Morality]. Together with the ongoing research by my fellows, we share this theme under the umbrella we call “Sensemaking Architecture”. As described in our essay Survival of the Fitting:
The increasing impact of digitalisation on individuals as well as society at large, the increasing availability of technology to everyone, the increasing and continuously shifting interdependencies between organisations and individuals within existing and new ecosystems, all these factors together need to be addressed by organisations. Because they impact the way we do business. But they cannot be addressed if we keep doing the same things, with the same aims, and with the same underlying assumptions. If we keep doing what we always did, nothing will change. And things must change, also in the way we approach enterprise architecture. This essay is about integrating the why of this change, with the what and how. It represents a new phase in Dynamic Architecture (DYA), called Sensemaking Architecture.
We translate the sensemaking in Sensemaking Architecture in three ways:
- Sensemaking as in making sense of the world, noticing what is happening outside and inside the organisation, understanding and interpreting events and trends, and recognising if and how these events and trends are relevant for the organisation.
- Sensemaking as in providing sense to the organisation in terms of purpose and place in the world.
- Sensemaking as in helping the organisation to take sensible actions, actions that lead to realisation of the organisation strategy.
Our aim is to look towards the future: what directions do we see in which the field of enterprise architecture should develop, or maybe even reinvent itself.
For several years I have been preparing, deliberating, and discussing on what to do. How to develop myself and my profession. In September 2023, I enrolled as candidate at Maastricht University, to do a PhD.
Let’s start a new adventure!
Hans Nouwens