Human-Centred Design as the Way Forward for Organization Design and Enterprise Engineering

Abstract

In this paper, human-centred design is put forward as an intellectual framework that can benefit both organization design (OD) and enterprise engineering (EE) research. The paper starts with a very brief summary of the main ideas contained in the book Designing Organization Design: a human-centred approach [18], where the principles of human-centred design have been applied to organization design. The paper suggests that while integration between OD and EE may not be a feasible proposition as part of the modelling exercise, the human-centred organization design (HCOD) framework can provide the contextual background in which EE researchers can/should situate, conceptualize, develop, and test their abstracted process models. Moreover, HCOD can provide important conceptual hooks to link separate projects in the areas of OD and EE. Two suggestions are put forward: the first concerns the modelling of meaning and sensemaking in the interaction of human actors, and the second refers to the use of the notions of causal and narrative design trace to keep track and analyze multifarious aspects of the organization’s self-awareness.