Untangling the Dynamic Structure of an Enterprise by Applying a Fractal Approach to Business Processes

A promising approach for analyzing and designing an enterprise is to consider it as a complex adaptive system (CAS) able to self-adjust to the changes in the environment. An important part of designing a CAS model is to untangle the dynamic structure of an enterprise. This paper presents a procedure for identifying all processes that exist in an enterprise as well as their interconnections. The procedure makes use of a number of process-assets and asset-processes archetypes. The first ones help to find out what assets are needed for a particular process, the second ones help to find out supporting processes that are needed to have each type of assets ready available for deployment. The procedure is based on the ideas of fractal organization where the same pattern is repeated on different levels. The uncovered dynamic structure of an enterprise can support strategic planning, change management, as well as discovering and preventing misbalances between its business processes. The paper also presents an example of applying the procedure to research activities of a university.