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Information in the enterprise
Darnton G., Giacoletto S., Digital Press, Newton, MA, 1992. Type: Book (9780131761735)
Date Reviewed: Sep 1 1993

In the postindustrial era, sociotechnical systems such as businesses face an environment that is hostile, complex, and turbulent [1]. This situation is reflected in the potentially limitless amount and variety of information an enterprise has to manage in its internal and external environments. According to Ashby’s law of requisite variety, an enterprise, to survive, must absorb the variety it is likely to encounter by possessing at least as much variety as it has to deal with [2]. To this end, the authors devote their book to the question of how information technology (IT) could successfully support postindustrial enterprises in navigating safely through their hostile environment. They claim that “no technology other than IT that at high level is capable of amplifying the enterprise’s internal variety sufficiently to allow the enterprise to absorb the variety it encounters” exists (p. 137). It should be noted, however, that the authors use the term IT to refer to the artifacts for performing operations on information, in the broadest sense, and to computing platforms, infrastructure, applications, special hardware, and user and system interfaces in its computer-based sense. Nevertheless, they recognize that IT, in spite of being necessary, is not sufficient for an enterprise to manage the complexity and variety it faces. This is a consequence of many interrelated factors, including

  • the dual nature of information utilization: IT can provide many enterprises with significant competitive advantages and extremely efficient use of resources. Nevertheless, it also raises many threats, such as information pollution, lack of information security, and serious difficulty in changing work performance or business processes; and

  • the common misconception that equates “information” with “computerized (structured) information.” Thus, a large portion of information that is really used by enterprises is totally or partially neglected, including semistructured and unstructured or unrecognized information.

In order to overcome these shortcomings and build an information processing machinery that effectively supports an enterprise in managing the complexity of the real world and the associated variety, the authors introduce their main idea, the enterprise information management model (EIMM). EIMM emerged from and evolved through their experience in developing information strategy, MIS-type applications, and an enterprise-wide information and information technology infrastructure at Digital Europe. Because different groups in an enterprise have different needs and languages, this model is composed of five complementary perspectives or levels of abstraction, namely business, systems, technical, product, and organization. A business perspective is concerned with the enterprise’s mission, objectives, and strategy; its information needs; and the information technology opportunities for effective usage and competitive advantage. A systems perspective comprises the complete and interrelated set of information systems needed to support the enterprise, along with priorities and organizational critical success factors. A technical perspective is a product-independent taxonomy of types of information system and design principles that apply to each generic system type. The product perspective considers the computing platform on which the computer-based information systems operate. Finally, the organization perspective is concerned with organizational and skill-related issues that are necessary for an enterprise to be in balance with the information technology it uses and with the organization structure implemented. Therefore, the EIMM can be viewed as a network of components, many of which have their own architectures.

A business architecture establishes “a clear understanding of the nature of the enterprise and its main objectives and activities. It provides a top-level framework within which information systems, organizational units, and other kinds of systems can be placed in the context, with interrelationships clearly understood” (p. 110). Moreover, interactions among the activities of business architecture, systems architecture, and organizational architecture take place as feedback loops and feed-forward loops. Therefore, they cannot be carried out sequentially but they must be done in parallel. On the basis of this view, the authors state that “An IS plan should no longer be separated from the enterprise plan and vice versa” (p. 110). A systems architecture, which includes data, technology, and applications, should identify all information systems needed to support the information needs of the enterprise, and decide which are non-IT-based and which are IT-based, whether they are computer-based, such as databases, DBMSs, and communications hardware and software, or non–computer-based, such as libraries, filing cabinets, microfilm, photocopiers, and faxes. The technical architecture is an “insulating layer” separating enterprise requirements for information systems, as expressed through systems architecture, from the set of products and components that cooperate in providing computing support to the enterprise’s information needs, that is, the product structure. Moreover, the technical structure includes a definition for an environment and infrastructure that are necessary for the integration and cooperation of different applications. Finally, organization structure emphasizes the mutual dependencies between an organization and IT and the emergent properties derived from the interaction between them.

The book is full of new definitions, practical suggestions, and revisited ideas. The material presented is of great value for those who are interested in a comprehensive framework for the effective utilization of IT. Finally, the authors succeed in presenting their experience in a lucid way that reveals the “top-down/bottom-up togetherness” approach they advocate.

Reviewer:  E. N. El-Sayed Review #: CR116531
1) Huber, G. P. and MacDaniel, R. R. The decision-making paradigm of organizational design. Manage. Sci. 32, 5 (1986), 572–589.
2) Dewhurst, D. The status of requisite variety. Kybernets 20, 2, (1991), 61–64.
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