Enterprise Ontology

In transitions from existing to projected states of affairs, having an orientation – a continual sense of relative position as one interacts with the environment – is logically prior to the meaningful use of other capabilities. Other capabilities have positive value only insofar as they are integrated or contextualized by orientation. This is the case regardless how powerful the other capabilities might be or the value they might provide once the correct orientation is established.

This is an intuitively obvious principle but it is not universally honored by business firms. One reason, ironically, may be that this is something we do intuitively in many areas of ordinary life. We ‘orient’ ourselves automatically. The need to give explicit attention to the issue of orientation does not occur to us, and the failure to do so does not occur to us as a possible cause of problems. Another reason is that the principle is more difficult to honor as the environment grows more complex.  

Our service offering to enlarge firms’ orientation in the environment is an enterprise ontology generated from the principles of Pragmatica. In the clinical healthcare setting ontology is getting a lot of attention these days, as well it should.  A robust clinical ontology is a powerful tool that can improve the quality of patient care and the efficiency and costs of its delivery. The virtues of ontology are not, however, unique to clinical or other domain-level settings. Those frameworks are a subset of ontology as a broader discipline – and they work because they are built on principles common to ontological analysis in general, regardless of the domain. Although much of the allure of domain-level ontology has been the prospect of quasi-omniscience that ontology combined with computer power holds out, that prospect is dependent on and derives from these fundamental principles. They enable our understanding of, and our coherent actions within, any environment.  

Ontology in the strong sense (not merely a static terminology framework) accounts for patterns of thinking, ideation, judgments, and decision-making. The articulated categories and relations of an ontology are quite literally 'how we think' within a given sphere or domain. Because thought and action are continuously inter-dynamic, a robust ontological model likewise accounts for the conditions under which actions will be effective and fruitful – how states of affairs are transformed and progress toward projected states of affairs is measured. The principles of ontology underlie the clarity, analytical and empirical rigor, efficiency, projectability, and other conditions that highly-effective work within any area requires.