Philip Huysmans

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.

Aligning the constructs of enterprise ontology and normalized systems

Literature suggests that, due to their complexity, organizations need to be designed in order to be effective and evolvable. Recently, two promising approaches have been introduced that are relevant in this regard. Enterprise Ontology creates essential models that are implementation-independent. Normalized Systems is concerned with the development of information systems with proven evolvability. In this paper, we combine both approaches. To this end, we express the transaction pattern—a central construct of Enterprise Ontology—using the constructs of Normalized Systems. By aligning these constructs, we attempt to introduce traceability between the Enterprise Ontology level and the Normalized Systems level. The resulting artefact exhibits the benefits of both Enterprise Ontology and Normalized Systems. We illustrate the application of the artefact in the context of enterprise architectures.

Identifying Combinatorial Effects in Requirements Engineering

There are several best practices and proposals that help to design and develop software systems immune (to some extent) to combinatorial effects as these systems evolve. Normalized Systems theory, considered at the software architecture level, is one of such proposals. However, at the requirements engineering (RE)-level, little research has been done regarding this issue. This paper discusses examples related with this problem considering two distinct RE abstract levels, namely at the business and system levels. The examples provided follow the notations and techniques typical used to model the software system at such levels, namely DEMO/EO, BPMN, and UML (Use Cases and Class diagrams). The analysis of these examples suggests that combinatorial effects can be easily found at these different levels. This paper also proposes a research agenda to further investigate this matter in terms of the effects of combinatorial effects, and envisions the mechanisms and solutions for dealing with them. It is suggested that an artifact-based, domain-specific approach is best suited to achieve highly agile enterprises and RE-processes in the future.

Positioning the normalized systems theory in a design theory framework

Several frameworks have been proposed to define design science and design theory. For this reason, positioning a research stream within both paradigms has become a difficult exercise. In this paper, the Normalized Systems (NS) theory is positioned within design science and design theory, in particular the design theory framework formulated by Gregor & Jones (2007). Normalized Systems theory has been proposed as a way to cope with the ever increasingly agile environment to which organizations and their software applications need to adapt. The results of positioning NS within the presented framework for design theories show that NS almost fully incorporates all components of the design theory anatomy. The application of NS theory to other fields is also discussed. By positioning Normalized System theory within design science and design theory, we also believe to contribute to the definition of both fields in this paper.

Evaluating Accounting Information Systems That Support Multiple GAAP Reporting Using Normalized Systems Theory

This paper uses a mixed methods approach of design science and case study research to evaluate structures of Accounting Information Systems (AIS) that report in multiple Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP), using Normalized Systems Theory (NST). To comply with regulation, many companies need to apply multiple GAAP. In case studies we identify AIS structures for multiple GAAP reporting. AIS need to cope with changes in GAAP and regulation in an evolvable way, the impact of the changes needs to be bounded. Since NST provides guidelines to design modular structures (in software) with an ex-ante proven degree of evolvability [1], we use NST to evaluate the identified AIS structures. We list violations of NST principles (combinatorial effects) and describe their manifestation in the cases. This application of NST in accounting demonstrates its relevance in non-software-specific domains. Moreover this is the first evaluation of an AIS with respect to evolvability.

Understanding entropy generation during the execution of business process instantiations : an illustration from cost accounting

The instantiation and execution of business processes typically generates an enormous set of data, including financial- and accounting-related information, based on different aggregation levels. As a result, it can be very complex to draw conclusions from this data, such as which steps in a business process are causing delays or, in an accounting context, which tasks are causing high costs. In this paper, we relate this complexity generated through business process execution to the concept of entropy, as defined in thermodynamics. More specifically, we show how information aggregation seems to be at the core of this phenomenon. We discuss six types of information aggregation dimensions which tend to increase entropy (and hence, complexity) in a cost accounting context. As entropy is generally controlled by adding structure to the considered system, we propose a set of preliminary guidelines to control this entropy based on insights from the Normalized Systems (NS) theory rationale.

Towards an Engineering-Based Research Approach for Enterprise Architecture: Lessons Learned from Normalized Systems Theory

The emerging field of enterprise engineering provides a promising outlook for positioning relevant research. Enterprise Architecture frameworks which are frequently used in practice, but are often criticized from a research perspective, can be positioned in this field. The challenge for the enterprise engineering field is to provide a framework to improve such frameworks using a rigorous scientific approach. This paper aims to contribute to addressing this challenge by proposing components for a research framework which focuses on applying engineering insights to enterprise architecture. It first explores how current enterprise architecture frameworks handle issues relevant for engineering (i.e., complexity, change and integration). It then introduces additional components which could contribute towards a more systematic approach. These components are derived from the way the Normalized Systems Theory was developed, and successfully introduced engineering standards into the design software architecture.

Using the DEMO methodology for modeling open source software development processes

Context: Open source software development (OSSD) process modeling has received increasing interest in recent years. These efforts aim to identify common elements in the development process between multiple open source software (OSS) projects. However, the complexity inherent to OSSD process modeling puts significant demands on the modeling language. Objective: In this paper, we propose that the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) may provide an interesting alternative to develop OSSD process models. DEMO exhibits two unique features within the context of OSSD process modeling. First, DEMO analyzes processes at the ontological level and provides high-level process descriptions, instead of focusing on the implementation level. Second, DEMO studies the communication patterns between human actors, instead of the sequences in which activities are performed. Method: We investigate the feasibility of using DEMO to construct OSSD process models by means of a case study. DEMO models were constructed to describe the NetBeans Requirements and Release process. In addition, the quality of these DEMO models was evaluated using a quality framework for conceptual modeling. Results: Our results showed that our DEMO models exhibited a high level of abstraction, thereby reducing the complexity of the OSSD process models. In addition, the evaluation of the models developed in this paper by using the quality framework for conceptual modeling showed that the models were of high quality. Conclusions: We have shown that the DEMO methodology can be successfully used to model OSSD processes and to obtain abstract and high-quality OSSD process models. However, given some potential drawbacks with respect to understandability and implementability, we primarily propose the use of DEMO within OSSD process modeling as an analysis tool that should be complemented with other techniques and models for communication and reenactment purposes.

Towards a System Requirements Specification Template that Minimizes Combinatorial Effects

This paper introduces the problem of combinatorial effects based on the evidence of many dependencies that explicitly or implicitly exist among the elements commonly used on system requirements specification (SRS). We start from the analysis and comparison of three popular SRS templates (namely IEEE 830-1998, RUP and with all templates), mainly from the perspective of the constructs and models involved. Then we propose and discuss a set of practical recommendations to help defining a SRS template that may better prevent (to some extent) the referred problem.

Translating Ontological Business Transactions into Evolvable Information Systems

In order to obtain enterprise agility, a number of approaches have recently been proposed to purposefully engineer enterprises. A first category aims to engineer evolvable information systems to enable the IT infrastructure to quickly adapt to changing business requirements. A second category captures an organization’s essence by engineering implementation-independent models. Although these approaches have their merits, they do not yet provide full traceability from the business to the information systems’ level. This paper proposes an approach to create a deterministic, traceable path from ontological business transactions — represented by Enterprise Ontology models — to evolvable information systems—represented by Normalized Systems theory — based on proven principles. Our results describe a set of principles that have to be obeyed to derive such a Normalized Systems Business Transaction.