On 6 November 2019, Renault and CESAM Community held the second Enterprise Architecture Day at Renault’s Technocentre in Guyancourt. Two days later, Émile Servan-Schreiber reshared the community’s recap, which placed his presentation on supercollective intelligence among the event’s plenary contributions.
The recap named the theme as Architecture @ Scale. Frédéric Vincent of Renault discussed digital transformation; Renaud Chevalier and Emmanuel Tardieu of AXA Banque covered agile frameworks at scale and experience with SAFe. Servan-Schreiber’s contribution brought collective intelligence into that discussion of how large organisations work.
The organisational side of architecture
The official event page explains that the day was intended to make enterprise architecture better understood by managers and executives. Its programme included governance, emerging architecture, data and the architect’s role. Those subjects concern the coordination of decisions across an organisation as well as the choice of technical tools.
Against that background, collective intelligence raises a related question: how should an organisation gather knowledge scattered among people and teams? Managers may need contributions from people who see different parts of a system. Bringing those views together requires decisions about participation, disagreement and synthesis, much as enterprise architecture requires explicit decisions about how separate systems connect.
Connecting systems and judgements
The programme’s governance and data topics make that connection relevant. A technical structure can help information travel across an organisation, while a decision process determines whose judgement influences what happens next. Servan-Schreiber’s presentation introduced collective intelligence into the same discussion of operating at scale. The published recap identifies the topic, without detailing his examples.
The event brought together scaling an organisation’s systems and making better use of the judgements within it. Our article on prediction markets in foresight develops a forecasting application of organised judgement. A separate NewsFutures case study discusses how previous forecasting performance can help identify useful contributors. These offer ways to explore the organisational question raised by the appearance: how can a large institution collect useful knowledge and make it matter to decisions?
