Janis Stirna

Participative enterprise modeling: experiences and recommendations

The objective of this paper is to report a set of experiences of applying participative enterprise modeling in different organizational contexts. While the authors have successfully applied the approach in many organizations, the paper primarily concentrates on three cases. On the basis of these experiences the paper presents a set of generic principles for applying participative enterprise modeling.

Capability Driven Development - an Approach to Support Evolving Organizations

The need for organizations to operate in changing environments is addressed by proposing an approach that integrates organizational development with information system (IS) development taking into account changes in the application context of the solution – Capability Driven Development (CDD). A meta-model for representing business and IS designs consisting of goals, key performance indicators, capabilities, context and capability delivery patterns, is been proposed. The use of the meta-model is exemplified by a case from the energy efficiency domain. A number of issues related to use of the CDD approach, namely, capability delivery application, CDD methodology, and tool support also are discussed.

Purpose driven competency planning for enterprise modeling projects

Much of the success of projects using Enterprise Modeling (EM) depends more on the quality of the process of modeling rather than on the method used. One important influence on the quality of the modeling process is the competency level of the experts responsible for the EM approach. Each EM project is, however, specific depending on the purpose of modeling, such as developing the business, ensuring the quality of business operations, and using EM as a problem solving tool. The objective of this paper is to discuss the core competency needs for the EM practitioner and to relate those needs to different purposes of EM.

Modeling business capabilities and context dependent delivery by cloud services

Contemporary business environments are changing rapidly, organizations are global, and cloud-based services have become a norm. Enterprises operating in these conditions need to have the capability to deliver their business in a variety of business contexts. Capability delivery thus has to be monitored and adjusted. Current Enterprise Modeling approaches do not address context-dependent capability design and do not explicitly support runtime adjustments. To address this challenge, a capability-driven approach is proposed to model business capabilities by using EM techniques, and to use model-based patterns to describe how software applications can adhere to changes in the execution context. A meta-model for capability design and delivery is presented with the consideration to delivering solutions as cloud services. The proposal is illustrated with an example case from an energy efficiency project. A supporting architecture for the capability development and the delivery in the cloud is also presented.

Why Enterprise Modelling? An Explorative Study into Current Practice

This paper presents an explorative study, which investigates the intentions behind current use of Enterprise Modelling (EM) in organisations. The intentions fall into two main categories: developing the business and ensuring the quality of the business. The results indicate that current methods are useful for these purposes.

Evaluating a Pattern Approach as an Aid for the Development of Organisational Knowledge: An Empirical Study

Patterns are a powerful paradigm that has emerged in recent years as a mechanism that can help towards the consolidation and dissemination of design experiences. In the context of the European research project ELEKTRA we developed a pattern approach for capturing best business practices of change management in the electricity sector. In this paper we briefly present this approach and concentrate on the issue of validating the pattern approach through evaluation of its different features. In particular, we define three constituent features, namely the knowledge contained in patterns, the language used to construct patterns and the method for developing the patterns. For each of these features we define an evaluation hypothesis and then test this hypothesis against a set of criteria and metrics. The experiments conducted and the results are presented in summary.

An Explorative Study into the Influence of Business Goals on the Practical Use of Enterprise Modelling Methods and Tools

An explorative study was carried out to investigate the intentions behind the use of Enterprise Modelling (EM) in organisations and to assess the implications of those intentions for EM tool support and participative EM. Some important conclusions are: 1) Participative EM should only be applied in consensus oriented organisational cultures and if properly applied it is a very strong way of committing stakeholders to business decisions, 2) The preparation of EM activities is critical and complex, meaning that it is not a task for novices, 3) Modelling experts prefer flexible and tools that give them methodological freedom, graphical power and reporting facilities, and 4) Future EM tools will need to cater for integration of methods.

Anti-Patterns as a Means of Focusing on Critical Quality Aspects in Enterprise Modeling

Enterprise Modeling (EM) is used for a wide range of purposes such as developing business strategies, business process restructuring, business process orientation and standardization, eliciting information system requirements, capturing best practices, etc. A common challenge impeding the value and impact of EM is insufficient model quality. Despite substantial attention from both researchers and commercial vendors of methods the current situation in practice with respect to the quality of models produced is not satisfactory. Many modeling projects produce bad models that are essentially useless. The objective of this paper is to introduce a format, anti-patterns, for documenting critical don’ts in EM and to demonstrate the potential of the format by using it to report a set of common and reoccurring pitfalls of real life EM projects. We use the format of anti-pattern for capturing the bad solutions to reoccurring problems and then explain what led to choosing the bad solution. The anti-patterns in this paper address three main aspects of EM – the modeling product, the modeling process, and the modeling tool support.

Bringing Enterprise Modeling Closer to Model-Driven Development

Enterprise Modeling (EM) provides the means for using models to represent organizational knowledge from different perspectives. When information systems (IS) are involved, Model-Driven Development (MDD) is an approach that focuses on the use of models as primary development artifacts. By observing that EM provides the context for high level requirements, which in turn are the input to MDD, we propose a meta-model that integrates enterprise models and requirements with design models in MDD. The meta-model defines six models that cover both organizational and IS development knowledge. Inter-model relationships ensure an integrated view of the enterprise and the supporting IS by allowing model components to be used across different models. The integrated meta-model is demonstrated through an example case study.

An Intentional Perspective on Enterprise Modeling

Enterprise Modeling (EM) has two main purposes: (1) Developing the business, which entails developing business vision, strategies, redesigning the way the business operates, developing the supporting information systems, etc., and (2) ensuring the quality of the business where the focus is on sharing the knowledge about the business, its vision and the way it operates, and ensuring the acceptance of business decisions through committing the stakeholders to the decisions made. In addition, EM has also shown to be useful as a general tool for articulating, discussing, and solving organizational problems. Based on a number of case studies, interviews and observations this chapter defines what is required from EM when adopted for these purposes and intentions respectively. More precisely, it addresses the following types of requirements: documents and models required as input, models that should be developed, requirements on the modeling language, requirements on the modeling process, tool requirements and model quality requirements. The defined requirements are then discussed taking a specific EM method, Enterprise Knowledge Development (EKD) as example.