José M. Tribolet is Full Professor of Information Systems at IST, (Instituto Superior Técnico), the Engineering School of Lisbon's Technical University (U.T.L.), in Portugal. Dr. Tribolet holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT (1977). As Visiting Fellow, at MIT's Sloan School of Management, in 1997-1998, he begun developing his current interest in Enterprise Architectures, Organizational Engineering, Business Process Modelling and Information Systems Architectures.

He founded in 1999 a new research center – CEO - (Center for Organizational Engineering), at INESC – INOV, to pursue these lines of research.

Dr. Tribolet co-chairs the track on “Organizational Engineering” at ACM´s SAC Conferences, since 2004. He will co-chair he new track on Enterprise Engineering, at the 2007 European Information Systems Conference.

Dr. Tribolet maintains an active professional profile, personally advising top executives on matters involving Business Information Systems, covering governance, strategy, architecture, alignment, change and knowledge management aspects.

Presentation
 The Role of EA in Organizational Governance and Self Awareness

The pervasive effects of computer science and information systems in organization science are raising a number of questions, such as how does real-time information and communication affect information and organization design; how might Enterprise Architectures, be used to influence the level or the quality of sense making in the organization; or what might be the impact of using Enterprise Architectures as tools for changing our perspective from an individualist user concept to a social actor in an information-rich context.

Enterprise Architecture has a potential far greater than it is presently commonly understood by its practitioners. By associating it with the ability to actively provide, to everyone and all in the organization, consistent and coherent views of the real time operations, semantically constrained and synchronized within the holistic representation of the Whole Enterprise, EA becomes THE TOOL supporting Organizational Self Awareness, and the explicit mechanism to assist the dialog and communication among those involved at all levels of Corporate Governance. To note: these are Humans!

Soon, we  - humans - will discuss organizational issues, from the strategic level to the most hand-on operational levels, with recourse to organizational engineering drawings, we will be able to "navigate" through various views of the organization, we will be able to visualize organizational dynamics, we will in fact be able to actively sync our human minds about our organization BEFORE we analyze events, discuss alternatives, and fight for power in making our minds about what decision to take.

Just like in any in any other field of engineering, just like we do when dealing with real time industrial systems, when we pilot airplanes or manage nuclear stations, EA will help Humans and Machines together, to do the best they can to bring about their common goals.

EA is all about improving the communication between Humans and between Humans and Machines. It is a pre-requisite to deal with complexity.

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