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 Lina Ly er toe geleid de samenhang op zingevingsniveau van The Royal Dutch Shell te onderzoeken.
In deze blog geef ik onderstaand alleen de intro van haar paper weer en verwijs graag naar de versie van het volledige paper op, dat je hier kunt vinden.
Intro van:
The effect of enterprise coherence on organizational effectiveness (Lina Ly, 2019)
In the current business practice, an integrated approach to business and IT is crucial. Enterprise architecture is an approach that captures the fundamental elements of the business, IT, and transformation. It provides the insights needed to balance the stakeholders’ requirements and facilitates the translation from business strategy to daily operations. The architecture captures relatively stable parts of the business and technology but has to be able to handle the changes in the environment and new insights as to what is essential to the organization. To ensure that these essentials are discussed in the organization, the architecture is required to show that the architectural decisions are connected and traceable to its business objectives and policies Lankhorst (2005). The communication between architects and stakeholders is generally supported by analysis, architecture models, presentations, and views. Business-IT alignment is generally recognized as an essential instrument to realize organizational effectiveness. Effectiveness is driven by the relationships between the relevant elements rather than by the detailed specification of each element Lankhorst (2005).
This fact indicates that coherence in an enterprise is a significant concern and that it should be governed. Furthermore, there is a need to make the coherence explicit and that it should be carried out permanently. Wagter (2019) By making the cohesive elements of coherence explicit and ensuring the quality of cohesive relationships, enterprises are able to determine the needs and priorities for change and assess how it may benefit from business and technological innovations. The Enterprise Coherence Framework (ECF) provides an approach to make the coherence explicit. The framework distinguishes three areas of coherence: coherence at the level of organizational purpose, coherence at the design level of the enterprise, and coherence between these levels. This paper focuses on how to make the coherence at the level of organizational purpose explicit, where the cohesive elements identified, corresponding to the concepts of strategy formulation: mission, vision, core values, goals, and strategy Wagter (2013).
The research question states as following: ’How to make enterprise coherence explicit at the level of organizational purpose in a specific context and develop a way of quantification of this coherence?’ In this research, the ECF is applied to make the coherence of the enterprise ’Royal Dutch Shell’ explicit. Shell is a Dutch-British multinational and is one of the six largest state-independent oil companies in the world Dutta (2005). Its annual report of 2018 is used to derive the needed information for the analysis. The process started with identifying their cohesive elements at the level of purpose. After that, the degree of coherence between these elements has been examined. Furthermore, this degree of coherence has been quantified. Finally, an interpretation, discussion, and conclusion with recommendations towards the explicit coherence of Shell have been discussed.