Artur Caetano

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.

Using roles and business objects to model and understand business processes

Business process modeling focus on describing how activities interact with other business objects while sustaining the organizations strategy. Business objects are object-oriented representations of organizational concepts, such as resources and actors, which collaborate with one another in order to achieve business goals. These objects exhibit different behavior according to each specific collaboration context. This means the perception of a business object depends on its collaborations with other objects. Business process modeling techniques do not clearly separate the multiple collaborative aspects of a business object from its internal aspects, making it difficult to understand objects which are used in different contexts, thus hindering reuse. To cope with such issues, this paper proposes using role modeling as a separation of concerns mechanism to increase the understandability and reusability of business process models. The approach divides a business process model into a business object model and a role model. The business object models deals with specifying the structure and intrinsic behavior of business objects while the role model specifies its collaborative aspects.

A framework for modeling strategy, business processes and information systems

In order to continuously improve its knowledge and to identify problems and possible solutions, an organization requires understanding of the way business is aligned with the organizational strategy and how information systems are supporting the business. The paper presents a framework for describing and associating organizational concepts at multiple levels of detail using three separate areas of concerns: goals and strategy, business processes, and information systems. The framework is presented as an extension to the Unified Modeling Language (UML) using a standard UML Profile. The framework concepts are illustrated by modeling the purchase and sales business operations of a retail store from the strategic, process and information systems viewpoints.

A Role-Based Framework for Business Process Modeling

Business objects are object-oriented representations of the concepts of interest in an organization, such as activities, resources and actors. Business objects collaborate with one another in order to achieve business goals, showing different behavior and properties according to each specific collaboration context. This means the same business object may be perceived differently depending on the business objects it is collaborating with. However, most approaches to business process modeling do not separate the collaborative aspects of a business object from its internal aspects. To cope with such issues, this paper makes use of role modeling to separate these concerns while increasing the understandability and reusability of business process models. This approach makes use of object-oriented concepts to separate a business process model into a business object model and a role model. The business object models deals with specifying the structure and intrinsic behavior of business objects, while the role model specifies its collaborative aspects.

A role-based enterprise architecture framework

Organizations deal with contrasting domains such as people, strategy, business processes, and information systems as well as with their representation, alignment and governance. In this setting, different approaches to enterprise architecture have been introduced to address these concerns. This paper focuses on describing an enterprise architecture framework centered in three core concepts (role, entity and activity) from which domain-specific concepts are derived from. The framework abstracts the organizations domains as five architectural views (organization, business, information, application and technology) and captures the concept dependencies and relationships across the different domains.

Immune System Simulation through a Complex Adaptive System Model

Evolutionary algorithms and cellular automata are two computational approaches to model complex adaptive systems. Here is described an immune system simulator that uses a cellular automaton to model the physical environment along with an evolutionary genetic algorithm to attain adaptation and selection. Agent genetic coding comprised within the genotype is a set of rules which expresses behavior. Moreover, an agent includes a collection of operators which use the genetic code in order to interact with other agents and physical sites. We also depict the system’s methodology as well as some of the obtained results.

Using Business Transactions to Analyse the Consistency of Business Process Models

This paper presents a method to analyse the consistency of a process model according to business transactions. Business transactions focus on specifying the pattern-based behaviour resulting from the collaboration between actors and systems while services and products are being requested and provided. The method makes possible assessing the consistency of a business process in terms of the business transactions that can be inferred from it. To do so, it takes as input a process model that is converted to a transactional model. The transactional model is then analysed and revised so that all transactions become consistent according to the pat-terns of DEMO. Finally, the original process model is revised to comply with the transactional model. As a result, the revised business process becomes consistent with the corresponding transactional model.

Modeling contexts for business process oriented knowledge support

In this paper, we propose an organizational model to describe the execution of business activities. The model offers a dynamic, actor centered, context based and business process oriented perspective of the organization that explicitly addresses the information and collaboration requirements derived from human multi-tasking capabilities. Actors are approached as a network of contexts managed by an “operating system”. Three kinds of actors are defined; human, business process and organization actor. Two context types are introduced. An action context defines the specific behavior and information needs of a human actor performing a task under a given role, at particular time intervals. Interaction contexts support and regulate activity-related interactions among action contexts. This modeling approach seeks to facilitate a personalized, proactive and timely knowledge support to human business actors. We illustrate these ideas with working examples.

Adding a Human Perspective to Enterprise Architectures

Enterprise modeling, commonly supported by enterprise architecture frameworks, has proved to be an effective communication tool that facilitates the development of applications aligned with the business. These modeling frameworks are concerned with organizations design rather than its actual implementation. We argue that modeling the actual implementation of organizations can be a valuable communication tool not only for systems development but also for organizational analysts, managers and workers. However, this kind of usage requires the inclusion of a human perspective in current enterprise architectures. In this paper, we propose to extend the CEO enterprise architecture with a human view based on a conceptual model consistent with contemporary paradigms of organizational science. The proposal is illustrated with examples drawn from a case study.

Using Ontologies for Enterprise Architecture Integration and Analysis

Enterprise architecture facilitates the alignment between different domains, such as business, applications and information technology. These domains must be described with description languages that best address the concerns of its stakeholders. However, current model-based enterprise architecture techniques are unable to integrate multiple descriptions languages either due to the lack of suitable extension mechanisms or because they lack the means to maintain the coherence, consistency and traceability between the representations of the multiple domains of the enterprise. On the other hand, enterprise architecture models are often designed and used for communication and not for automated analysis of its contents. Model analysis is a valuable tool for assessing the qualities of a model, such as conformance and completeness, and also for supporting decision making. This paper addresses these two issues found in model-based enterprise architecture: (1) the integration of domain description languages, and (2) the automated analysis of models. This proposal uses ontology engineering techniques to specify and integrate the different domains and reasoning and querying as a means to analyse the models. The utility of the proposal is shown through an evaluation scenario that involve the analysis of an enterprise architecture model that spans multiple domains.