The Practicalities of Management Modelling

EA modelling of management processes[1]  has a similar overall purpose to other modelling systems such as Checkland's Soft Systems Modelling[2] and Beer's Viable Systems Model[3],[4]. They use their own (typically) visual languages to map and describe management systems and processes with the common purpose of aiding conversations about improvement and optimisation.

A brief comparison of the similarities and differences between these three Human Activity modelling systems is worthwhile as it sets the context for the use of Enterprise Architecture in this particular exercise and indicates how EA modelling can be enriched by drawing in features from the SSM and VSM approaches.

The fundamental commonality is the recognition that they are all attempting to model human activity systems and that they will be fuzzy descriptors as a result. There is no attempt by any to eliminate the human variability factor, only to accommodate it and to exploit its strengths.

What SSM and VSM both bring to EA is what Checkland calls the world view and Beer calls the environment. It is easy with EA to concentrate just on the enterprise and its systems and miss the impact of the outside world when planning.

A further feature that VSM brings to the consideration of management systems is their recursive nature: smaller systems exist within larger systems, but each has the same control and communications profile. All institutions are agglomerations of self managing units within units.

It is also important to recognise that the fact that de-facto self managing systems will emerge to fill gaps in the management infrastructure that institutional senior management are likely to have no knowledge of. The current student attendance monitoring processes at the University provide several examples of such invisible localised management arrangements.

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[1] http://www.jiscinfonet.ac.uk/infokits/ea/index_html

[2] Checkland, Peter B. & Poulter, J. (2006) Learning for Action: A short definitive account of Soft Systems Methodology and its use for Practitioners, teachers and Students, Wiley, Chichester.

[3] 1972, Stafford Beer, Brain of the Firm; Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, London, Herder and Herder, USA.

[4] 1989, Ed. Espejo and Harnden The Viable System Model; John Wiley, London and New York.