ABSTRACT
Systems thinking views the enterprise as a whole and assess the system properties to try to understand the system behavior. This chapter reviews the basic concepts of systems thinking, systems science, systems engineering, and systems architecting. Systems thinking can be seen as a reaction to the failure of natural science when confronted with complex, real-world problems set in social systems. Systems thinkers advocate using holism rather than reductionism in such situations. Holism does not seek to break down complex problem situations into their parts in order to study them and intervene in them. Rather, it respects the profound interconnectedness of the parts and concentrates on the relationships between them and how these interrelated parts often give rise to surprising outcomes called the emergent properties. Knowing this basic information about systems helps in understanding the origin of the significance of enterprise architecture (EA) and the constituting business architecture, information architecture, application architecture and technical architecture. This also provides the context for the significance of business processes in contemporary enterprises. Many of the current paradigms for enterprise improvement adhere to a systems view including lean enterprise systems, total quality management, and supply chain management.
