Applying systems engineering to the enterprise

When treated as a system an enterprise can benefit from the principles, metaphors, archetypes, practices, and tools of systems engineering. Enterprise effectiveness and sustainability can be improved considerably relative to typical enterprises. This paper highlights how systems engineering can be applied to initializing and evolving a successful, sustainable enterprise whether the enterprise is in the public or private sector, profit or non-profit, small or large, and growing or not. Not surprisingly, the most challenging kind of enterprise to initialize and evolve is the kind that accomplishes systems engineering.