Language and meta-language for EA
Blog: Strategic Structures
That was the topic of a talk I gave in October last year at an Enterprise Architecture event in London. These are the slides, or most of them, anyway.
Metalanguage is commonly defined as language about language. And if that was the meaning I intended, it would have that type of relation to the language and then probably what I’m writing here could have been referred to as a mixture of another meta- and a meta-meta-language. It wasn’t the meaning I intended. I have found that there is a need to describe properly the “objects” that people in organisations are concerned about and how they relate to each other. It could be some way to represent physical things such buildings, documents and servers or abstract concepts such as services, processes and capabilities. And although it relates also to abstract things, I sometimes call it “language for the substance”.
Organisations are autonomous and adaptive systems, continuously maintained by their interaction with their niche, the latter being brought forth from the background, by that very interaction. While a language such as the one proposed can be useful to understand the components of an organisation, it doesn’t help much in understanding the dynamics and viability. The language for the substance cannot be used to talk about the form. That’s why there is a need, maybe temporarily until we find a better solution and probably a single language, to have another language and that other language I called meta-language in the presentation.
As this is a language for the form, I keep looking for ways to utilise some proposals, one of the most fascinating being George Spencer-Brown’s Laws of Form. Papers like this one of Dirk Baecker give me hope that it is possible. Until then, for the purposes of Enterprise Architecture, I find the Viable System Model, with the whole body of knowledge and practice associated with it, as the most pragmatic meta-language.
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