Designing enterprise systems: leveraging knowledge in a distributed pattern-building community

Enterprise networks are “socio-technical” systems “par excellence”, depending on the integrated management of knowledge of a range of co-ordinating technical and socio-technical processes. The paper outlines a cross-disciplinary collaboration taking a socio-technical perspective on the design and management of extended ICT-supported systems such as the supply chain and e-business portals. It investigates the potential of patterns, pattern-languages, and pattern-building communities as vehicles for the collaborative construction, transfer and re-use of tacit knowledge from the different domains of expertise required to inform the design of these complex, networked systems.