Enterprise design for dynamic complexity : architecting & engineering organizations using system & structural dynamics

As the business world is neither linear nor static, the mastery of its "chaotic" nonlinear dynamics lies at the heart of finding high-leverage policies that return uncommon benefits for marginal costs. Today's global enterprises are dynamically complex socio-technical systems where cause and effect of management's strategies and policies are distant in space and time. Spatial complexity recognizes that correctly defining the limits of the extended enterprise is essential in maximizing shareholder value via stakeholder management. Temporal complexity recognizes that policies, decisions, structure and delays are interrelated to influence growth and stability. An enterprise's long-term success therefore is a function of management's ability to control this "dynamic complexity". The goal of this thesis is to develop management insights into "enterprise design", i.e. to create more successful management policies and organizational structures. Enterprise design can be decomposed into the science and art, or engineering and architecting. Using the heretofore-separate academic fields of system dynamics and structural dynamics, an attempt is made to define the scientific "laws" of enterprise physics that will then be used to construct non-obvious, often counter-intuitive enterprise architectures. The goal is to combine the methodologies from the "business of building" with the "building of business", in an attempt to draw lessons from the design of high-rise buildings for the design of high-rising enterprises. Throughout this thesis, examples of a variety of socio-technical enterprises are discussed in order to explore and test the principles and insights developed herein. There is however a unifying case study

Department dc:contributor.department

Leaders for Manufacturing Program at MIT

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Piepenbrock, Theodore F. (Theodore Frederick), 1965-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Charles H. Fine and Deborah J. Nightingale.

• Sloan School of Management.
• Civil and Environmental Engineering.
• Leaders for Manufacturing Program.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/34777

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/34777