Antonia Albani

Advances in Enterprise Engineering I

7th Enterprise Engineering Working Conference, EEWC 2017, Antwerp, Belgium, May 8-12, 2017, Proceedings

The discipline of enterprise engineering

A century ago, Taylor published a landmark in the organisational sciences: his Principles of Scientific Management. Many researchers have elaborated on Taylor’s principles, or have been influenced otherwise. The authors of the current paper evaluate a century of enterprise development, and conclude that a paradigm shift is needed for dealing adequately with the challenges that modern enterprises face. Three generic goals are identified. The first one, intellectual manageability, is the basis for mastering complexity; current approaches fall short in assisting professionals to master the complexity of enterprises and enterprise changes. The second goal, organisational concinnity, is conditional for making strategic initiatives operational; current approaches do not, or inadequately, address this objective. The third goal, social devotion, is the basis for achieving employee empowerment as well as knowledgeable management and governance; modern employees are highly educated knowledge workers; yet, the mindset of managers has not evolved accordingly. The emerging discipline of Enterprise Engineering, as conceived by the authors, is considered to be a suitable vehicle for achieving these goals. It does so by providing new, powerful theories and effective methodologies. A theoretical framework is presented for positioning the theories, goals, and fundamentals of enterprise engineering in four classes: philosophical, ontological, ideological and technological.

Basic notions regarding business processes and supporting information systems

In order to achieve and maintain an optimal fit between business processes (BPs) and business process support systems (BPSs), both need to be understood thoroughly and coherently. Moreover, to benefit fully from the potentials of modern information and communication technology (ICT), the deep structure that lies behind the surface structure of BPs should be understood. The Ψ-theory, which is only summarized in this paper, provides the basis for such an understanding of BPs and BPSs as well as for some other basic notions. In particular, the notions of design and engineering and of architecture and ontology will be addressed. The conclusion is that these notions can consistently and coherently be related to each other, on the said theoretical basis, such that the concurrent (re)design and (re)engineering of BPs and BPSs can be performed more effectively.

Identifying Business Components on the Basis of an Enterprise Ontology

Companies are more and more focusing on their core competencies, outsourcing business tasks to their business partners. In order to support collaboration between business partners, adequate information systems need to be built automating inter-organizational business processes. The bases for such information systems are business components combining software artefacts from different vendors to applications which are individual to each customer. The crucial factors in identifying and building reusable, marketable and self-contained business components are the appropriateness and the quality of the underlying business domain models. This paper therefore introduces a process for the identification of business components based on an enterprise ontology, being a business domain model satisfying well defined quality criteria.

The Benefit of Enterprise Ontology in Identifying Business Components

Companies are more than ever participating in so-called value networks while being confronted with an increasing need for collaboration with their business partners. In order to better perform in such value networks information systems supporting not only the intra- but also the inter-enterprise business processes are necessary in order to enable and ease collaboration between business partners. Therefore, they need to be interoperable. As the basis for building these information systems the concepts of enterprise ontology and business components are very promising. The notion of enterprise ontology, as presented in this paper, is a powerful revelation of the essence of an enterprise or an enterprise network. Reusable and self-contained business components with well-defined interaction points facilitate the accessing and execution of coherent packages of business functionality. The identification of business components, however, is still a crucial factor. The reported research seeks to improve the identification of business components based on the ontological model of an enterprise, satisfying well-defined quality criteria.

Enterprise ontology based development of information systems

For the development of enterprise information systems, the utilisation of a suitable methodology is essential, providing necessary methods and techniques for modelling the business domain and for designing the supporting information systems. Several methodologies exist and are widely applied in practice nowadays, but most of them lack a theoretical foundation. In this paper, we demonstrate an information system development methodology based on the notions of enterprise ontology and business components, and explain it within the conceptual framework called the generic system development process. The methodology allows for reduction of complexity of domain models and for identification of stable business components.

An Enterprise Ontology-Based Approach to Service Specification

In recent years, the Web Service Definition Language (WSDL) and Universal Description Discovery Integration (UDDI) standards arose as ad hoc standards for the definition of service interfaces and service registries. However, even together these standards do not provide enough basis for a service consumer to get a full understanding of the behavior of a service. In practice, this often leads to a serious mismatch between the providers intent and the consumers expectations concerning the functionality of the corresponding service. Though additional standards have been proposed, a holistic view of what aspects of a service need to be specified is still lacking. This paper proposes a service definition, a service classification, and service specification framework, all based on a founded theory, the

Domain Based Identification and Modelling of Business Component Applications

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Dynamic Modelling of Strategic Supply Chains

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Component framework for strategic supply network development

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