Systems thinking is an approach to reasoning and treatment of real-world problems based on the fundamental notion of ‘system.’ System here refers to a purposeful assembly of components. Thus, systems thinking is aimed at understanding relationships between components and their overall impact on system outcomes (i.e., intended and unintended) and how a system similarly fits in the broader context of its environment. There are currently several distinct flavors of systems thinking, both in practice and scholarship; most notably in the disciplines of systems science, systems engineering, and systems dynamics. Each of these, while similar in purpose, has a distinct history and a rich set of methods and tools for various application contexts. The WPI Systems Thinking Colloquium held on 2 October 2019 was aimed at exploring the diversity of perspectives on systems thinking from these disciplines. The colloquium brought together world-renowned experts from both industry and academia to share insights from their research and practice. This paper offers a compilation of summaries of the presentations given.

In this paper we summarize the research on Systems Thinking for business management and explore several examples of business failures due to a lack of application of Systems Thinking, with an ultimate goal of offering a Systems Thinking approach that is useful to all levels of management. Although there is significant literature aimed at facilitating Systems Thinking in organizational management, there remains a lack of adoption of Systems Thinking in mainstream business practice. This is perhaps because the literature does not reduce high-level Systems Thinking principles to hands-on, practical protocols that are accessible for typical managers, thus limiting the working application of Systems Thinking concepts to researchers and consultants who specialize in the field. The goal of this work is to not only elaborate on the high-level ideals of System Thinking, but also to articulate a more precise and practical hands-on approach that is useful to all levels of business managers.

The Department of Defense Architectural Framework (DoDAF) is the DoD's mandated method to document system architectures. The current version of DoDAF i.e. v2.02 advocates a data-centric process focused on eliciting data to facilitate decision support. It prescribes a domain ontology i.e. the DoDAF Meta-Model (DM2) aimed at ensuring conformance and interoperability of architecture models. Although DoDAF currently does not prescribe or proscribe specific methodologies or tools, the mismatch between DoDAF's underlying modeling approach and mainstream methodologies and supporting technology in Systems Engineering (SE) has been alluded to in the literature [1-3]. This paper proposes a process for architecting of systems in line with the DoDAF, aimed at bridging this gap. Additionally it offers a discussion of supporting tools in this regard.

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