Michaël Petit

A Taxonomy Learning Method and Its Application to Characterize a Scientific Web Community

The need to extract and manage domain-specific taxonomies has become increasingly relevant in recent years. A taxonomy is a form of business intelligence used to integrate information, reduce semantic heterogeneity, describe emergent communities and interest groups, and facilitate communication between information systems. We present a semiautomated strategy to extract domain-specific taxonomies from Web documents and its application to model a network of excellence in the emerging research field of enterprise interoperability

Understanding Business Strategies of Networked Value Constellations Using Goal- and Value Modeling

In goal-oriented requirements engineering (GORE), one usually proceeds from a goal analysis to a requirements specification, usually of IT systems. In contrast, we consider the use of GORE for the design of IT-enabled value constellations, which are collections of enterprises that jointly satisfy a consumer need using information technology. The requirements analysis needed to do such a cross-organizational design not only consists of a goal analysis, in which the relevant strategic goals of the participating companies are aligned, but also of a value analysis, in which the commercial sustainability of the constellation is explored. In this paper we investigate the relation between strategic goal- and value modeling. We use theories about business strategy such as those by Porter to identify strategic goals of a value constellation, and operationalize these goals using value models. We show how value modeling allows us to find more detailed goals, and to analyze conflicts among goals

Enhancing the ArchiMate® standard with a responsibility modeling language for access rights management

In this paper, we describe an innovative approach for aligning the business layer and the application layer of ArchiMate to ensure that applications manage access rights consistently with enterprise goals and risk tolerances. The alignment is realized by using the responsibility of the employees, which we model using ReMoLa. The main focus of the alignment targets the definition and the assignment of the access rights needed by the employees according to business specification. The approach is illustrated and validated with a case study in a municipal hospital in Luxembourg.

A Unified Enterprise Modelling Language for enhanced interoperability of Enterprise Models

There is a serious backwardness in awareness, acceptance and wide use of the Enterprise Modelling (EM) technology in industry because enterprises cannot capitalise from previous modelling efforts. This situation hinders true enterprise integration, interoperability, and enterprise knowledge sharing. A Unified Enterprise Modelling Language, based on meta-modelling of existing EM Languages, would serve as an Interlingua between EM tools providing the business community with a common visual, template based language to be used on top of most commercial enterprise modelling and workflow software tools.

Building a Responsibility Model Including Accountability, Capability and Commitment

This paper aims at building a responsibility model based on the concepts of Accountability, Capability and Commitment. The models objectives are firstly to help organizations for verifying the organizational structure and detecting policy problems and inconsistency. Secondly, the paper brings up a conceptual framework to support organization for defining their corporate, security and access control policies. Our work provides a preliminary review of the researches performed in that field and proposes, based on the analyses, an UML responsibility model and a definition of all its concepts. Thereafter, to propose a formal representation of the model, we have selected the suitable language and logic system. The analyze highlights that an important variable is whether the responsibility is perceived at a user or at a company level.

Modeling business strategy: A meta-model of strategy maps and balanced scorecards

Business strategy is aimed to support the vision of an enterprise, by paving the way to achieve it through goals that direct the strategys execution. However, there is a lack of means to establish and assess the alignment of business strategy and goal oriented requirements engineering. The objective of our ongoing research is to model business strategy in order to establish well-defined and traceable links with system requirements. In this paper, we propose a business strategy meta-model for Strategy maps and Balanced Scorecards. The validity of the meta-model is tested through a case scenario using OWL and Telos.

Some Methodological Clues for Defining a Unified Enterprise Modelling Language

The need for a Unified Enterprise Modelling Language (UEML) that would be used as in inter-lingua among enterprise modelling software tools has been established. The process of defining this UEML goes through the elaboration of a precise meta-model describing the constructs of the language. A possible and reasonable approach for the definition of this meta-model is to integrate (parts of) meta-models of existing enterprise modelling languages. This approach has similarities with the well studied problem of databases integration in which the models of several databases have to be integrated into a single one. In this paper, we make an analogy between the two problems and review a state of the art methodology proposed in database integration to derive methodological clues for the definition of the meta-model of a UEML.

Model-Driven Strategic Awareness: From a Unified Business Strategy Meta-Model (UBSMM) to Enterprise Architecture

Business strategy should be well understood in order to support an enterprise to achieve its vision and to define an architecture supporting that vision. While business views are identified in many Enterprise Architecture (EA) proposals, business strategy formulations from the area of Strategic Management are overlooked. Thus, IT solutions cannot be traced back to business strategy in a clear and unambiguous way. Our intended proposal, a Unified Business Strategy Meta-Model (UBSMM), aims at establishing such a link. UBSMM is a formalization of the integration of known business strategy formulations with precise semantics enabling its model-level usage to provide strategic awareness to Enterprise Architecture. In this paper we present the development process of UBSMM, and further, we propose conceptual relationships towards Enterprise Architecture (EA).

Modeling Competition-Driven Business Strategy for Business IT Alignment

Business strategy aims at supporting the vision of an enterprise, by paving the way to achieve it through goals that direct the strategy’s execution. Aligning business strategy to system requirements requires explicit models from both business strategy and requirements engineering. However, existing business strategy definition approaches are informal and their syntax is based on natural language, therefore, they cannot be used in model-driven alignment. An objective of our research is to define a well-structured business strategy modeling language. In this paper, we propose a business strategy meta-model based on Porter’s work on competition driven strategy and its extension by Stabell and Fjeldstad. Our UML meta-model is formalized in Telos and OWL. An initial validation is performed by instantiating the meta-model using a case scenario.

Towards a Unified Business Strategy Language: A Meta-model of Strategy Maps

Alignment between business strategies and the resources engaged ensuring their realization, has been a continuous concern of enterprises of all kinds in last few decades. Commonly, enterprises fail to establish the traceability from business strategies towards operational tasks carried by employees. From the requirements engineering perspective this problem leads also to a misalignment between business and IT assets. In this study, we argue that for communicating high-level intentions and strategies down to the operational perspective, i.e. tasks and resources, the core necessity is to have a rich and well-defined language for modeling business strategies. Such a language could be further utilized for facilitating formalizations and a constructive analysis of high-level business aspects of enterprises, as well for comparing and unifying existing intentional modeling languages from the business and requirements engineering domains. As a reference proposal for formalizing business strategies, we consider the well-established strategy maps [1] from the Management Information Systems community which provide textual concepts of strategy-related notions establishing causal relationships between them. We have set an effort to formalize strategy maps in the form of a meta-model, usage scenarios and constraints, providing a systematic basis for obtaining a unified language/ontology for business strategy modeling.