Last Saturday on the road to Fryslân I listened on the radio to the Tros Nieuwshow. As the program existed 25 years, a diversity of guests reviewed what changed in those years and what the next 25 years would bring.

Philosopher Joep Dohmen illustrated the added complexity of the world by the multicultural society (of the Netherlands) and the new way people are connecting as secret idealists (versus the mass demonstrations of the past). The complexity and diversity has grown.

Science journalist Maarten Keulemans illustrated that we come from the physics age, with exact laws, and have entered the biology age, with factors like growth, evolution and flexibility.

‘United States specialist’ Willem Post illustrated the changes through the president candidate debate of McCain and Obama of that Friday night by comparing it to the worldview of earlier presidents (especially Bush). The McCain – Obama debate was not based on worldpower, 'democracy within months (to Irak)', Europeans are naive sweet people with no power, the fighting spirit of Martians and the success of capitalism. These were old-president values. The debate was based on collaboration with the world (including Europe, even France was mentioned as partner, although no part of 'the coalition of the willing') and making new meaning.

And then it struck me. The conceptual age has come. As Daniel Pink introduced in A Whole New Mind. The right brain is taking over (without the left brain becoming obsolete). And I saw the application of that to Information Science.

We can make the move from the ‘information age’, located in Zachman Framework’s Designer view, with hard system and logical models (close to the software) and innovation based on (information) technology. With ratio, logic, precision and analysis as the basis.

We can go to the Zachman’s Owner view, with models that contain the complexity and diversity of the world. And we can start seeking innovation, flexibility and synthesis based on new conceptualisations of the world. Not that the in the Zachman framework mentioned models can already contain that. We need more ‘biological’ models. That can represent growth, evolution, etc. There is much work to do to get worldview paradigms and dilemma’s and to model these. But this conceptual layer with enterprise models will need priority now.

The information architect and every knowledge worker will feel the consequences of this. They will need to become conceptualisers.

Rijk van Vulpen is enterprise architect at Caerleon.

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