In 1982, as part of a Master's in Systems Management degree Systems Analysis project, following insights as a child and youth, I began defining the requirement and identifying the system specifications for a "whole-enterprise management system". When I began, I was also working (during the period 1982 - 1989) in the role of Management Analyst, which grew into Management Officer (Organization, Manpower, Equipment, Financial, and Improvement Management), which then grew into Assistant Comptroller and then Information Resource Manager (early CIO) for a 12,000 person Army Division-sized organization. I then worked in the role of Lead Information Engineer (IT Architecture, IT Standards, IT Requirements Assessment, and IT POM/Plans/Budgets) for a Theater Army of over 300,000 people. I subsequently had assignments as Management Analyst in Customer Relations, TQM, Reengineering, Information Resources, and Performance Management up until 1995 when I left Government service. I have subsequently worked as a Contractor in the roles of Business Analyst, Notes Architect and Designer, BPR Practioner, Strategic Planner, Systems Integrator, and Principal Information Engineer.
The systems analysis of "whole-enterprise management" I initially conducted beginning in 1982, and have been refining and tracking since that time, has shown me one critical requirement for all of the "management" systems I've worked on. That one, consistent, unfilled requirement is for technology that provides a high degree of dynamically changing situational, contextual awareness for people and processes as they operate in their various activities.
As part of the requirement analysis of this unfulfilled requirement, I identified a need to manage what are now becoming known as "hierarchical namespaces" (i.e., tree structures) of adjectives (classes) and nouns (instances), which I've found are common features of ALL management systems, providing a means to decompose the categorization of the managed things to finer and finer levels of detail. Built from this finely grained capability to name things, a second common feature was the ability to associate, using verbs, the hierarchical namespace entries together in pairs, which could then be combined into larger collections, forming the "profile" (i.e., star structures) of how the namespace entries related to each other along specific dimensions. Built on the tree and star was a third common feature of the ability to track and project "changes over time" (i.e. "Arrow of Time" structures) in the namespace/nouns and profiles/verb-phrases for historical, status, and planning analysis, tracking, and reporting. The tree, star, and arrow features are what are today known as "Design Patterns". The requirment for combined tree+star+arrow patterned management structures has shown up over and over in my career, in almost every need I've seen where "management" of something is required.
From this long-running analysis of generalized management system requirements for the tree/star/arrow patterns, I've identified, designed, and refined a "General Enterprise Management" (GEM) model of how these tree/star/arrow management capabilities could be implemented as a "Context Management" system.
Over the years I've developed and refined designs for systems to provide this Context Management tree/star/arrow capability, and have seen more and more technologies become available that provides increasingly greater tree/star/arrow patterned Context Management functionality. The current technologies using the tree/star/arrow pattern in varying degrees are:
"object" management as in the Object Management Group (OMG)
"Directories" X.500, LDAP, OS/NOS Accounts/Groups, Database Accounts/Groups/Roles, etc.
Metadirectories in X.500 and LDAP
SGML/XML/XSL/XLL
the common information model (CIM) schema of the OpenGroup and OMG, with the CIM metaschema exactly matching the tree/star/arrow pattern
profiling/privacy/customization/permission management
Security Certificate management via Directories and Metadirectories
Multidimensional Data warehousing
Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) capability in the form of pivot tables, crosstabs, data cubes, and object databases.
The problem with all of these technologies is that they are all focused on managing fragments of the enterprise and its components, not the "whole" enterprise. Using the GEM model, I have learned how to apply the tree/star/arrow patterned Context Management to the whole enteprise, and all of its human and other components, within it's larger environment, and the value-chains that flow into, out of, and within the enterprise.
I've updated the GEM to encompass these technologies as they progress and reach greater levels of integration and capabilities, reaching closer to the point they can provide the fundamental requirment for a "high degree of dynamically changing situational, contextual awareness for people and processes as they operate in their various activities" cited earlier.