Platform Enterprise

Chapter 1. Framing Enterprises as Sociotechnical Platforms

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

Becoming and remaining a competitive business is a constant tension for enterprise organizations building new products and services that extend their existing footprint. In a digital economy defined by rapid change, enterprise engineering organizations must be built to support adaptability and long-term resilience in response to the complexity of enterprise organizations. This means not only being able to withstand change but also to embrace it through experimentation, at the same time mitigating risk that hinders the prospect of a durable and sustainable future. The difficulty of this challenge lies in the inherent complexity of enterprise organizations.

Enterprise engineering organizations cannot operate as purely technical systems; they must also consider both the social and organizational implications of what it means to build and operate software for enterprise audiences. This is where sociotechnical theory and its practices can ...