An approach to development enterprise capacity at an early childhood development centre

Abstract

Significant progress has been made in South Africa’s early childhood and Grade R spheres. However, South Africa has a long way to go to meet the needs of the majority of its children. Institutional capacity (IC) refers to the administrative and managerial functions in an early childhood development centre (ECDC). The failure to develop IC impacts the quality of services delivered to the most vulnerable children in our society. This dissertation identifies various existing approaches/frameworks for developing institutional capacity, but that are not integrated in a manner deemed useful nor effective for a ECDC administrator wishing to improve the quality of its services. Knowledge areas with no application within ECD were used to create a baseline for an enterprise capacity development approach (ECDA) and demonstrated in an ECDC in a South African context. Enterprise engineering (EE) as a discipline, together with its theories and fundamentals, informed the constructional design of the ECDA, undergirded by Hoogervorst’s approach, IC approaches, and approach design principles. The enterprise evolution contextualisation model (EECM) provided descriptive guidance for the ECDA, while the generic system development process (GSDP) delineated between using and provisioning systems as part of the enterprise design process. The ECDA, scoped to the provisioning system, consists of five activities that are applied as a heuristic to iteratively redesign design domains to affect performance areas. These activities entail the execution of construction design cycles for selected design domains, the identification of performance areas, and the identification of constructional requirements and specifications, followed by the extraction of design principles. An action design research (ADR) methodology was used for this study, and guided the formulation of the problem and building and constructing the ECDA, together with the iterative shaping of the ECDA in a real-world demonstration. After evaluating the results of this study, it was concluded that the ECDA had a significant impact on improving the quality of services. The ECDA was thus found to be useful to the ECDC administrators in developing enterprise capacity.