The Essential Project: Harnessing Conceptual Structures to Expose Organizational Dynamics

Abstract

Conceptual Structures CS have the ambitious aim of integrating the creativity of individuals and organizations with the productivity of computers to address business problems more effectively. Unfortunately, in terms of the progress and impact of CS, the practice appears to lag far behind the theory. A major reason is the inadequacy of the enterprise architecture tools that might be used to support CS. This paper introduces the Essential Project, a ten-year development program that has produced an open source enterprise architecture support toolkit with a comprehensive metamodel. In common with other enterprise architecture management suites, Essential enables users to define and describe their enterprise in terms of its current and future states. A new version, the Essential Intelligence Platform, supports inference-based analysis of the stored information and other capabilities that offer realistic support for the conceptual structures of an enterprise. This platform also serves as the launch pad for a range of business services designed to address common business problems.