Abstract
Contemporary organizations are operating in a hypercompetitive environment, in which they are faced with challenges such as increasing complexity and increasing change in many or all of their aspects. As such, current organizations need to be more agile to keep up with the swiftly changing business environment. However, current development practices for information systems supporting these organizations appear to be insufficient to deal with these levels of changing complexity. Normalized Systems theory therefore proposes a theoretical framework that explains why current modular structures in information systems are intrinsically limited in terms of evolvability, as well as how modular structures can be built without these limitations, thus exhibiting evolvable modularity. The goal of the proposed Ph.D. research project is to develop a contribution to how evolvable modularity as a theoretical framework can be further extended from the technological level to the business level and as such support business processes, enterprise architectures and their supporting IT systems. The ultimate purpose will be to make organizations as a whole more agile by developing so-called normalized design patterns (domain models) on the business level in order to allow a more deterministic approach enabling the ‘expanding’ of enterprises.
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De Bruyn, P. (2011). Towards Designing Enterprises for Evolvability Based on Fundamental Engineering Concepts. In: Meersman, R., Dillon, T., Herrero, P. (eds) On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2011 Workshops. OTM 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7046. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-25126-9_3
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