Sustaining key stakeholders' vital values within ethical enterprise architecture
- Publication Type:
- Thesis
- Issue Date:
- 2009
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In clearly defining, and then designing, a socio-technical system of enterprise architecture for a unique enterprise, the ultimate goal is to identify sustainable approaches that enshrine ethical decision-making. Because of its sustainability focus, this study includes not only the technical architecture, but also the general delivery of the values of all stakeholders to the enterprise. This includes consideration of the guardianships of stakeholders; their needs and resulting objectives; how those objectives determine choices made for the architecture of the management system; and the supporting policy environment.
The intent is to develop a mechanism that identifies variation in values from those intended. Values are an abstract form of energy, a force that satisfies participant needs and motivates us to work. Sharing ethically based values, across all key stakeholder guardianships, whether they are customers, managerial and non-managerial personnel, or shareowners, build the foundation stones for an effective, visionary philosophy and ethical behaviours. They are a determinant of the optimal trajectory for the structures and systems. This 'Tapestry of Values‘ transforms a random group of individuals into a coherent and committed team of crucial organisational participants. Values with their basis in ethics also recognise that to secure excellent performance an enterprise has to manage not only logical and technical capabilities; it has to manage feelings and emotions as well. Without the strength of a people-centred value system, an unbounded, flattened network organisation can create untidiness and personal vulnerabilities. Clear, common values provide guidelines for behaviour and a secure framework in which change and growth is possible. Values have this transformational power.
The central tenet states that the values in an enterprise of the 'vital few‘ stakeholders together with the so-called 'trivial many‘ play a significant role in the positive formation of the shared values system, and informal rules of behaviour, in the enterprise. By outlining the pathway to making critical decisions based on ethical rather than strategic imperatives, a new explainable method that redefines, operationalises and demystifies the traditional Mission-Vision-Values enterprise architecture emerges.
This then introduces the Enterprise Constancy Continuum, a schema for the execution of ethical managerial decisions. This schema adopts and explains an Attitudes-Governance-Ways-Means-Outcome continuum as the phases of the new model broken into overlapping reality check strands called the Systematic Leadership and Trajectory Optimisation.
To facilitate the assessment of the state of alignment of beliefs to goals, the Values Effectiveness-Trajectory (VE-T) Two-by-Three Matrix provides a reckoner of the pulse of the body of enterprises by measuring the extent of any compromise to the immune system. This assessing tool recognises any distortion to the effectiveness of the shared values in measuring, and responds as appropriate with corrective actions.
Once implemented, the mechanisms developed in this doctoral thesis, will require a very long timeframe to recognise significant change, or even a valid null result. This lengthy timeframe takes the validation of this mechanism beyond the scope of a doctoral thesis.
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