4. The keyholes
Looking through a keyhole is a simple way of thinking about each professional viewpoint — including disciplines, people, and their experience.
One keyhole might reveal a sequence of activities. Another might reveal applications, information and integration. A third might reveal people, responsibilities and decision rights.
Each view is useful. Each can expose important detail. The difficulty begins when a partial view becomes the assumed definition of the whole system.
A process model, for example, is very good at showing the sequence and movement of activities. An architecture view can reveal systems, interfaces and information dependencies. An organisational view can expose roles, authority and responsibility. None of these views is wrong. But none, on its own, fully describes the Business-System.
Business-Systems Engineering therefore provides a common engineering context in which those professional perspectives can be brought together. Its core concepts — Purpose, Capability, Participants, Relationships, Behaviour, Items, State, Governance, Evidence, Learning and Evolution — provide a common shared language for discussing the same operational reality.
The view into the larger room represents that wider context. The three keyholes have not disappeared. We can still look closely at process, technology or organisational relationships whenever they help. The difference is that we now all understand them as perspectives on something larger.
The shared-space idea of Bashō is used here as a Business-Systems Engineering metaphor for the larger context in which individual perspectives can be brought together. <insert hyperlink: Read more: Business Analysis, Ba and Bashō — Seeing the Bigger System>
Business-Systems Engineering moves from analysing isolated parts to understanding how those parts participate in one living organisational system.
Business-Systems Engineering does not remove professional perspectives: it gives those individual perspectives somewhere larger to stand.