Door: Roel Wagter
In mijn rol als copromotor en gastdocent aan de Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen begeleid ik via de Faculteit der Natuurwetenschappen, Wiskunde en Informatica jaarlijks een aantal studenten. Na mijn college over ‘sturen op samenhang’ ontvangen de betreffende studenten de opdracht om naar keuze een jaarverslag van een onderneming te downloaden en de samenhang op zingevingsniveau van deze onderneming te onderzoeken en te waarderen. Voor alle duidelijkheid, het betreft hier tussentijdse studieresultaten in de vorm van een op te leveren paper. De komende tijd zal ik, overigens met toestemming van de betreffende studenten en de universiteit een aantal van deze papers publiceren. Dit doe ik in de hoop opdat velen deze exercitie zullen navolgen. Immers een goed niveau van samenhang is randvoorwaardelijk voor een hoog reactievermogen, hoge aanpasbaarheid en het bereiken van de beoogde performance. En het sturen op samenhang begint met het sturen op samenhang op zingevingsniveau. Te weten de samenhang tussen de missie, visie, kernwaarden, doelen en strategie. Voor een ieder die meer wil weten over ‘sturen op samenhang’ zie ons laatstelijk gepubliceerde boek.
De onderzoeksopdracht
De onderzoeksopdracht zoals omschreven in de inleiding heeft bij student Thuur Geraats ertoe geleid de samenhang op zingevingsniveau van Ahold Delhaize te onderzoeken.
In deze blog geef ik onderstaand alleen de intro van zijn paper weer en verwijs graag naar de versie van het volledige paper.
Intro van:
Coherence at the level of purpose Ahold Delhaize, Thuur Geraats (2019)
This paper is written for the course ‘Systematic Approaches to Information and Organisation’ given at the Radboud University for Information Sciences students. For this course, there exist eight different topics from the field of Information Sciences. Every student had to choose one topic and write a paper about it. I choose for the topic of enterprise architecture because I am interested in modelling and like the fact that through modelling, an understanding is developed about the different connections that exist within an organisation. The overarching theme of this paper will thus be enterprise architecture.
The subject of the paper is based on the presentation ‘steering on coherence’ given by dr. Roel Wagter on 30 September 2019 at the Radboud University. In this presentation it was explicated how the company Solventa, and in particular dr. Wagter, uses the Enterprise Coherence Framework (ECF) as a basis for analysing organisations. In the presentation an extensive overview of the ECF was given. On top of that, the Enterprise Coherence Governanceapproach (ECG) and the Enterprise Coherence-governance Assessment (ECA) were discussed.
Although the ECF, ECG and ECA are intertwined, the focus of this paper will only be on the ECF, in the upcoming text it is argued why this is the case.
After the lecture, we (the group of four students that were assigned to dr. Wagter as a mentor for this course) had a conversation about the topic. In this conversation, dr. Wagter gave us a suggestion about a subject on which we could write the paper. The proposed subject implied analysing the coherence of an organisation’s level of purpose, based on public available documents about the organisation. We could choose whatever organisation we found interesting, as long as there were enough documents available that enabled us to analyse the coherence of the level of purpose of the organisation. I fancied this idea and decided to work it out.
The organisation I choose for this assignment is Ahold Delhaize. I choose this organisation because it is a multinational organisation with net sales of €62,800,000,000 in 2018 (Ahold Delhaize, 2018). It has multiple other organisations under its holding such as Albert Heijn (the biggest supermarket in the Netherlands). Another reason why I choose this particular organisation is because Ahold Delhaize presents itself to the outside world as a very professional organisation. I am very curious whether this status of professionalism can also be found in their annual report.
The purpose of this literature study is to describe the coherence at the level of purpose of Ahold Delhaize. The research question that is central in this paper is as follows: “To what extent do the different aspects of the level of purpose of Ahold Delhaize show coherence with each other?” At this stage of the research, the level of purpose of the organization will be generally defined as the mission, vision, core values, goals and strategy of Ahold Delhaize, based on their annual report 2018.
For now, some concepts like ‘level of purpose’ and ‘ECF’ may not be clear to the reader. The next section of the paper will elaborate the relevant part of dr. Wagter’s thesis about Enterprise Coherence Governance. After this part, the different aspects of the level of purpose of Ahold Delhaize will be presented. In this section of the paper there will be frequently referred to the annual report of Ahold Delhaize. Furthermore it is argued in that section why certain statements are chosen as level of purpose, because for some elements that is up to interpretation from the reader of on the annual report. After defining the different elements of the level of purpose, their coherence with each other is checked. The coherence of the different aspects will be mentioned and elaborated. The last section of the paper contains a substantiated grade about the properness of coherence on the level of purpose of the organization (Ahold Delhaize), some general remarks about the paper and suggestions for future research.