Can a Re-Discovery of Open Socio-Technical Systems Strengthen EA?
Recent publications by reputable market research firms affirm that IT organizations and Enterprise Architecture groups are not doing very well: high project failure rates and low acceptance of the Enterprise Architecture group. These challenges can be attributed to the “mechanistic” worldview of current IT organizations according to socio-technical systems theory, a theory from the 1950s which has only recently started to be integrated in IT. Over the last decade, there has been a quasi-exponential growth in the use of the term “socio-technical systems” in the IT literature. From this, one could suggest that a possible paradigm shift is occurring in the IT space: a shift from a mechanistic view of organizations to a socio-technical one based on the rediscovery that organizations are open socio-technical systems.