A systemic approach to governance in extended enterprise systems

This paper is an effort to introduce Enterprise Systems Governance (ESG) as a new systemic approach to governance within the System of Systems (SoS) environment. The proposed interdisciplinary approach combines theories of complexity and social sciences with those developed for systems and networks to: theorize problems of Extended Enterprise Systems (EES); explore how they are governed; and study how their governance structure strives for effectiveness over time. ESG adopts qualitative insights from complexity theories fundamentals, organizational behavior studies, systems thinking tools, and social sciences, and supports them with quantitative procedures and techniques such as agent-based modeling, social network analysis, dynamic systems analysis, and game theory to create new set of methodologies, tailored for governing EES. We believe that ESG can be expanded to become a new field of science that will address the need for a fundamental understanding of how organizational architectures evolve around technological systems and processes to generate complex network-based structures. It will also offer effective and holistic solutions to resolve major challenges regarding the governance of socio-technological and large-scale extended enterprises, SoS, and adaptive complex systems, such as the financial system as well as development programs and infrastructure systems.