The purpose of the INCOSE Enterprise Value Working Group (ESWG) is to advance and to promote the application of Systems Thinking, Systems Science and Systems Engineering to understanding and managing the enterprise as a system.

Enterprises are highly complex, sociotechnical systems of systems that depend on the intelligent interaction, creation, management and use of various forms of knowledge throughout their organizational policies, processes and structures. Failure to design, to operate and to remediate enterprises as systems, is the primary underlying cause of the gross inefficiencies, unintended consequences and systemic failures that routinely inflict substantial economic loss and societal harm.

Systems engineering (SE) is an interdisciplinary methodology for understanding, designing and enabling system solutions for complex problems, and as such it is uniquely suited to offer understanding and solutions in the domain of enterprises. However, as applied to sociotechnical systems such as enterprises, SE must include an understanding of basic social sciences, human factors and other "soft" disciplines that may be unfamiliar to systems engineers who are more accustomed to focusing on physical, electronic and technical systems.