Sisteming

Sisteming is a term used in some Indonesian-speaking professional communities to describe the practice of designing, organizing, and managing complex sets of components to function as a coherent system. It encompasses the integration of people, processes, data, technologies, and governance structures to achieve defined objectives. Because it is a relatively new or regional term, its exact scope can vary, but it typically emphasizes holistic thinking and the coordination of interdependent elements rather than isolated improvements.

The word combines the Indonesian root sistem (system) with the English gerund suffix ing, reflecting cross-cultural influences in contemporary professional discourse. In practice, sisteming overlaps with established concepts such as systems engineering, systems thinking, and enterprise architecture, but is often used informally to describe end-to-end system design and lifecycle management in organizations, including IT, operations, and business processes.

Core activities associated with sisteming include requirements elicitation, architectural design, component modeling, standardization and interoperability planning, risk assessment, implementation governance, documentation, testing, deployment, and ongoing maintenance. Effective sisteming tends to require cross-functional collaboration, clear stakeholder alignment, and the use of modeling tools or frameworks to map dependencies and interfaces.

Critics argue that as a term it can be vague or duplicative of existing disciplines, risking scope drift if not anchored in specific goals, metrics, and governance structures. Proponents contend that sisteming offers a practical label for a multidisciplinary, system-wide approach to complex organizational challenges.

See also: system engineering, systems thinking, enterprise architecture, IT governance.