STREAMS – Systems Thinking, Real Enterprise Architecture and Management Science

Ian Glossop
23 April 2018

This presentation will outline the STREAMS ideas and Philosophy.  STREAMS is a set of ideas about how to build and manage an Enterprise based on a common, rigorous STREAMS Philosophy. It leads to methodologies, methods and techniques for building, managing, evolving and innovating Enterprises that can be applied in practice but, like an Engineering approach, its methods are grounded in rigorous research and understanding.

Common to the three main strands, or tributaries, of STREAMS is the Use of Models: conceptual models of a variety of descriptions and characteristics ranging from highly complex mathematical models informed by volumes of quantitative data grounded in empirical observation and measurement to simple qualitative models expressing some simple truth. The purpose of the models is to guide Decision Making.

STREAMS is a set of ideas that are both transdisciplinary and integrative of theory and practice. It is "Trans-disciplinary" in the sense that it eclectically draws on ideas, theories, principles and methods from a range of academic disciplines - deliberately paying no heed to the traditional divisions in universities - or similar academic institutions. It is "Integrative" in the sense that is seeks to blend these ideas into a coherent, well-founded theoretical framework - but also incorporate empirically grounded and proven ideas and practices from Practice, not just academic theory. STREAMS is not intended to be an academic exercise in the social science but theoretically-sound ideas and methods for practitioners in engineering enterprises.