BCS Northampton: Soft Systems Thinking

BCS Northampton Branch

Soft Systems Thinking, Methodology and the Management of Change

BCS Northampton Branch Lecture

Tuesday 31st October at 7pm with 7:30pm start

Room 205, The Newton Building, Avenue Campus, University Of Northampton, Northampton. NN2 6JD

How to support organisational transformation involving the development of;

*  IS development, 

*  Enterprise architecture, 

*  Programme and project management

Kees has spent most of his adult life figuring out how to do things differently. During most of the last two decades he has worked for a wide spectrum of public and private customers. After a decade as an officer in the Royal Netherlands Air Force and a period of involvement with decision-making and organisational learning in crises, his engagements have been concerned with making sense of complexity and uncertainty in stakeholder-rich situations. He has been working as a "Strategy and Change" consultant with experience in strategy making, management of change, portfolio and programme management, and enterprise architecting and worked for a wide variety of central and local government departments and services, commercial enterprises and third sector organisations.

His work has focused on working with organisation leaders through the use of systems thinking, defining common purpose and desired outcomes, and implementing all means required to achieve these. In addition, his work has concentrated on exploring how to improve business performance and the introduction of innovative and collaborative working practices and technologies. He co-founded the consultancy Koios Group in 2004, which he led till 2012, after which he worked for Atkins, Jacobs and PA Consulting before re-embarking this year on growing VH2 ltd.

He has published a number of papers and book contributions. He has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Southampton, Cranfield University, Cardiff University, Aston University, Hull University, Loughborough University and a Visiting Fellow at the University of Warwick. He has accepted to take up a new parttime role involving the Executive MBA programme.

Kees is a Systems Thinker, passionate about transformations and his urge to "think differently" about complex organisational challenges. He has developed a strong disliking for approaches that are too concerned with "how", whilst ignoring "why" and "what". In this presentation, Kees will introduce some key underpinning concepts and case studies published in his recent book, which he co-authored with Prof Brian Wilson, one of the original founders of Soft Systems Methodology. He will present "Soft Systems Thinking, Methodology and the Management of Change" and explain the features, advantages and benefits of their Soft Systems Methodology-centred approach using a selection of case studies involving organisations and their information, information systems and technology, and enterprise architectures.

Doors will open at 19:00 hrs, The Presentation will commence at 19.30hrs.

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