Assessing stakeholder salience through the view of lean enterprise transformation

Aerospace enterprises tend to take a strategic approach to managing their enterprise. This thesis posits that stakeholder theory presents another way of looking at the enterprise, as it incorporates elements of both structure and behavior. Using a Lean enterprise thinking framework, this thesis employs stakeholder theory to explain enterprise dynamics and decision making. The thesis uses Enterprise Architecture (EA) theory, developed at MIT's Lean Advancement Initiative (LAI), for the Lean thinking enterprise framework. The thesis proposes that an enterprise's core ideology drives its business model and enterprise architecture spaces, which in turn drives stakeholder networks. Stakeholder saliency and identification is based on the relevance of their values exchanges to the enterprise business model and capabilities contributed to the EA. Finally, this system evolves over Epochs, which are a function of time. These ideas are applied to architecting future states of an enterprise. Quantitative models of stakeholder saliency, stakeholder network control structures, Design Structure Matrix, ESAT, and system dynamics are investigated. The thesis finds that stakeholder networks are context dependent with enterprise Epochs. Enterprise core ideology and leadership saliency are the only constants in the system. The thesis adds to insights on stakeholder salience, in a Lean enterprise context, that may be generalized to the aerospace and defense industry. The findings are significant to the aerospace industry's ability to optimize value creation.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2010

Author dc:creator

• Sisto, Gwendolyn A

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Deborah Nightingale.

• Aeronautics and Astronautics.

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/1721.1/59698

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/59698