Societal Architecture and Collaborative Decision Making

The book has a focus on digital enablers, digital common pool resources, for the human side of the societal enterprise "big three subjects": Leadership (Humanity), Decision Making and Communication.

Key accelerators for the finishing of the book's second draft have been multiple, and include:

• the availability of open-source modeling tools that cover various dimensions of public and private decision making,
• the availability of Open PM2 guides on portfolio, programme, project and agile management,
• the work done by UN/CEFACT on the EDIFACT messages (Electronic Data Exchange For Administration Commerce and Transport) and the UN/CEFACT Modeling Methodology (UMM) in support of Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) between trading partners involved in administration, commerce and transport,
• the presentation by John Adair of some key, yet simple decision-making frameworks including the three circles: achieving the Task, building the Team and developing the Individual,
• advances on tax justice,
• the digital capability principles, as applied in GAMSO,
• the SDGs and related initiatives by the United Nations;

Consider as task the 2030 Agenda, as team the living members of mankind and as individual each one of us, but as you are reading this abstract, especially also you.

At first sight, decision making appears to be solely relevant to that first circle "achieving the task" at the top, whatever that may be. 

But, as Adair reminds us in his books, in the context of leadership (human) decision making (which here includes problem solving and creative thinking) by necessity involves the Team (collaboration) and Individual (skills) circles as well, and these circles are always interactive.

In the age of digital interdependence, those circles are also globally to locally connected, and the teams include a wide variety of professionals conceiving, delivering and running the digital platforms that empower the human side in any enterprise. Those digital platforms and the digital artefacts that flow through them have been created over the past decades and following a lot of analyses. 

Currently, the skills circles are plagued by a variety of divisions, including those of content versus ICT, those with access to externalized knowledge versus those without that access, rich versus poor, center versus periphery, and destructive - even state sponsored terrorism -, versus constructive attitudes.

In the #tagcoding handbook and the #xy2wiki portfolio, the focus has been on skills and platform for reducing the "digital" divide between those with access to online externalized knowledge and those lacking such access, between the centers and periphery of human development.

In recent years, I have prioritized the #tagcoding handbook and online tools, because the contradictions about access and center versus periphery are the most salient. But given the slow adoption of #tagcoding and #xy2wiki, I concluded that the separation between content and ICT also needed urgent treatment. If only to clarify the importance of #tagcoding and #xy2wiki for the 2030 Agenda.

The message of the book is this: through the use of semi-formal models and repositories in collaborative planning, communication between citizens, including decision makers, and ICT professionals can be dramatically improved, to the extent that a talent explosion for sustainable development becomes feasible.

During the coming months there will be updates, and the price will likely increase to reflect the book's value. Buy your copy now to secure access to future versions and the planned extras such as the ArchiMate, UML and BPMN models from which the figures have been and will be created. These models will be in open formats or in file formats supported by tools such as Archi, Modelio and Sparx Enterprise Architect.