Center for Open Enterprise Management


Challenge

Enterprise management requires policies to be filtered down informally through management levels and, for those policies that should be executable by IT, then implemented formally in code by programmers. This not only results in delay and expense, but also frequently the resulting formal semantics of the executable processes reflect better the ease of implementation rather than the intent of the policies.

The lack of computational support for the interdependcies among value creating enterprise actors leads to further inefficiences. These problems of cost, delay, and poor implementation of executive intent are exacerbated when, as is increasingly the case for the Internet-connected world, companies interact with one another in complex supply chains and virtual companies implemented with 19th-century methodology of laying tracks and switches to move information.

Approach

Our approach to solving this problem is a revolutionary IT concept, declarative enterprise management: the use of compuational logic that gives people within an enterprise the ability to say what should be the case and have such policies be directly interpreted, correctly, by an underlying compuational substrate. Such a computational substrate is dependent upon formal semantics that describe all enterpise policies, services, people, resources, and activities.

The result is a kind of "enterprise physics" in which "laws" of the enterprise directly control its operations. "Open" means that these laws are availble though common web interfaces for creation and editing and that they have a compuational and operational effect on the enterprise soon as they are made.

Impact

Enterprise physics provides a basis for compuational support of "Collective Work": distributed individuals pursuing multiple objectives the pursuits of which may conflict or reinforce each other. Enterprise physics allows the proper notification of how each affects the other, allowing co-creation of value.

Additionally, all enterprise participants are empowered to create, dynamically, new processes to achieve their goals, according to the enterprise laws. Such processes are guaranteed to be legal and correct even if a relevant policy was stated only a moment ago. Finally, with such an approach, it is largely irrelevant how much of the enterprise is vitual.

The result is extreme agility in an enterprise that fully leverages the new technologies of the Internet, computational logic, and semantics, in order to function like a healthy complex organism responsive to changing conditions.

Center Description             Digital Department