The Importance of Practicing Foundational Insights in Enterprise Governance and Enterprise Engineering

Excellent enterprise performance critically depends on proper organizing. All too often, organizing is inadequate, driven by management hypes or pseudotheories. For proper organizing, this chapter provides reasons for practicing the foundational insights, which were outlined in our accompanying publication, in enterprise governance (dealing with enterprise change) and enterprise engineering (dealing with enterprise design). After outlining the different forms of organizing and the crucial notion of emerging organizing, the importance of design—the creative hinge point between enterprise intentions and their realization—is sketched as the basis for enterprise performance. Design becomes even more important in view of the trends and characteristics of the modern enterprise context. Implications of developments in the areas of technology, information, business, and organization are outlined. It is argued that these developments, as well as the objectives of corporate governance (compliance) and IT governance (‘business and IT alignment’), can only be properly addressed through enterprise-wide design within the overarching scope of enterprise governance. Such a holistic, integrative perspective is seriously hampered by theoretical fragmentation and incompleteness, leading to partial and incoherent approaches while integral and coherent ones are needed. This further hampers practicing foundational insights. For overcoming these problems, the chapter argues the crucial importance of the enterprise design science that enables linking the insights of the foundational sciences with concepts for enterprise design and enables coherent and consistent enterprise-wide design, the critical condition for enterprise operational and strategic performance. The chapter closes by outlining the topics of the subsequent chapters.