Disruption and Images of Organisation

Abstract

The short answer to the question “what is needed to make enterprises and software less vulnerable against disruptive events?” is: eliminate the disruptive character of events. Disruption, defined as a violent dissolution of continuity (OED), is not a property of an event as such, but is about the disruptive effect that some events can have on enterprises or software systems. The better enterprises and their systems are able to deal with disturbances in their environments, the less they will be disrupted. How enterprises are viewed and organised is important in this regard. One view is to approach enterprises as machines, cf. the concept of enterprise engineering. Viewed as a machine, an enterprise will be modelled and structured as primarily driven by events causing sequences of predefined processes. Another view is the enterprise as an organism, flexibly acting to achieve its goals, using instruments and adapting to never fully predictable circumstances. This paper will argue that enterprises seeing and structuring themselves along the organism metaphor will be less vulnerable than enterprises seeing and structuring themselves along the machine metaphor.