Jay Ramanathan
Abstract
Today's businesses must continuously adapt to external conditions in accelerated time frames. This requires businesses to shift from strategies that eliminate variation to those that embrace variation and changing conditions. Industrial-age Make-Sell businesses accomplished objectives by steadily eliminating variation. In contrast, today's sense-and-respond (S-R) businesses must often execute by embracing variation and learn to perform given widely varying circumstances [4]. Specifically, the S-R business must adapt to external conditions by managing along the chain: "Sense changing opportunities→Request variation→Product variation→Response process variation→Resource variation and Information variation→Efficient delivery and feedback→Business growth and survival." (Here, the implication symbol "→" reflects cause and effect.) Recognizing that IT holds the promise of enabling the S-R enterprise, transformation is often accompanied by enterprise integration projects but with limited success. Project experiences spanning the past 10 years suggest that IT must first meet key challenges.
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Index Terms
- Fractal architecture for the adaptive complex enterprise
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Reviews
Robert Kolter
Ramanathan describes some concepts that, in his opinion, are capable of improving modern business information technology (IT) systems. Since such modern systems encounter evolving process structures, he models adaptive enterprise systems with a concept that he calls fractal architecture. The article starts with a brief description of modern sense-and-respond (S-R) businesses that (in contrast to older make-sell businesses) can be described by a request-driven transaction loop. This loop includes the following steps: sensing the environment, which results in a request that the system has to perform; requirements and planning, execution, and delivery (RED), which are steps the system has to perform; and response, which results in a deliverable object. The important steps are requirements and planning, execution, and delivery. In these steps, several instances of other systems that have a similar structure can be invoked. Essentially, this is the reason for the term fractal architecture. The author characterizes S-R businesses using the following four patterns: the triage pattern, which models the variation of requests the system has to perform; the RED fractal, which realizes the architecture described above; the agent assistance pattern, which is a model for the variable use of resources; and the infrastructure use pattern, which models the usage of the underlying system. The author concludes the article by citing some ways that businesses can benefit from integrating these adaptive complex enterprise (ACE) patterns into their enterprise IT architectures. I agree with the author's opinion that complex modern systems have to be modeled in different ways than traditional systems are. The approach described here seems to be a good concept, and the results from its application seem to prove this. Online Computing Reviews Service
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