Companies nowadays work with an Enterprise Architecture to align business, information, applications and infrastructure. There are several standards for this already, like TOGAF</http> (focussed on the process) or the Zachman Framework</http>.
My argument is that there is also an architecture needed for [the Wiki Workplace]. How does the Human Interaction Management System and the use of social software fit in? The place of this Human Interaction Management System (or "Enterprise 2.0") probably would be as indicated in the simplified figure below:
Furthermore, how valid would the following analogy be? The biggest trend in information architecture is Service Oriented Architecture. The idea is to get the proper information in the business process by calling the right (information) service. The service will be delivered by IT onto an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), to make it available (and findable).
Will we need a "People Oriented Architecture" for the 'Wiki workplace'? And will the architecture contain a 'Enterprise People Bus' (EPB) to make people services available and manageable?
So the right half of the first figure is about the 'Human Interaction Management System' (what is also called 'Enterprise 2.0'). This is about turbulent processes with a lot of work from people involved, in contrast to the more stable processes that are dealt with by BPM. The main question in this "Enterprise 2.0"-area is: "How do you get the right co-worker at the right place and time, to do the work (s)he's good at? John Hagel talks about pull models vs. push models. A pull model exists within a situation of abundance. It knows two main processes:
- A proces that adds meaningful artefacts/resources to a repository, with attention to the possibility to find it back.
- A proces that gets and uses the artefact/resource from the repository, at the moment of need.
An example of a pull model for knowledge is Wikipedia (or any wiki): there is a process in which writers ad knowledge and another process in which people get the information at the time they need it. On the internet, and everywhere in the world, you can find examples of pull models.
But in the field of organization you don't find them that much. Resources are normally planned and pushed in a work schedule. To me, Enterprise 2.0 (and Enterprise 2.0 Architecture) introduces pull models for the organization. But not only with knowledge pull models (like wikis), but also with people pull models. Social networking sites give us an example of that: friends or business relations are added, without the need for contact at that particular moment; use of the contact takes place later and then it is taken from the repository. So my proposition is: to get (human) resources to the right project, a modern organization does not use a push model, like planning, but takes a new approach - a pull model -. This involves creating a repository of co-workers and a very good way of searching it. In the outside world, you find this way of organizing within employment agencies.
Now when we hear John Hagel talking about pull models, we also hear him say that they exist of several layers. So now we established that there is a place for a pull model within Enterprise 2.0, to get resources at the right time at the right place, then we know that the Enterprise 2.0 Architecture must consist of several layers.
And which are these layers? I think of the following:
1. co-workers
2. place within the organization (dependent on organizational structure, knowledge, social network, reputation)
3. process layer (turbulent 'human' processes)
4. business goals
5. context demands
