So, in my last article “Visualizing the Complexity of the Enterprise”, I talked about the new graph feature added in the app Enterprise Evolver (“Evolver”). This graph feature is the foundation upon which many technical capabilities can be added into the App to understand enterprise complexity and to support decision making for any business transformation initiative. 

An enterprise is a living complex system where every resource (e.g. people, systems, data, processes, services , technology etc) within the enterprise are related by a common goal and mission. Everything is interconnected and constantly evolving like in a social network. I mentioned previously that we can apply the same discipline (Social Network Analysis -SNA)  to organizations as well for decision making. The discipline includes concept like network size, connections, centralization, clustering etc among different groups. The scope of enterprise architecture also includes the people, activities/processes, technology and information, and their relationship to one another and to external environment. In social network graph we usually have one kind of resource, i.e. People; in EA, we can represent many type of resources (people, technology, services, application system etc) and their relationships. 

We can apply concepts like centrality to identify important resources (“vertices”). These resources could be  important application systems or services or even business capability (after all business capability can also be considered a supra resource, a container of all resources that deliver a specific outcome) . Moreover, isolated resources with no or fewer links/connections to other resources, say to business service could also be identified. These isolated nodes may pose certain risks in business. There are many other applications that I can imagine such as in organization design and value analysis and many other.

 What do you think? Looking forward to hearing from you.

 

Reference – Social Network Analysis (SNA) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_network_analysis