A goal-oriented requirements modelling language for enterprise architecture

Methods for enterprise architecture, such as TOGAF, acknowledge the importance of requirements engineering in the development of enterprise architectures. Modelling support is needed to specify, document, communicate and reason about goals and requirements. Current modelling techniques for enterprise architecture focus on the products, services, processes and applications of an enterprise. In addition, techniques may be provided to describe structured requirements lists and use cases. Little support is available however for modelling the underlying motivation of enterprise architectures in terms of stakeholder concerns and the high-level goals that address these concerns. This paper describes a language that supports the modelling of this motivation. The definition of the language is based on existing work on high-level goal and requirements modelling and is aligned with an existing standard for enterprise modelling: the ArchiMate language. Furthermore, the paper illustrates how enterprise architecture can benefit from analysis techniques in the requirements domain

Enterprise Engineering - A New Organizational Discipline (1)

The e-business ecosystem generates a pressure on modern companies to invest massively in technologies that can bring them into the digital world of business. In their race to become a player in the global information system, companies have accumulated many layers of software that, in turn, generated what is now known as the software complexity issue. What is missing in most organizations is a mechanism that can align or "bridge the gap" between the concerns of corporate strategists and IT project managers. As a consequence, a new discipline has evolved, enterprise engineering, to deal with enterprise architectures. The enterprise architecture describes the logical linkages between the enterprise business, information and technical architectures and the enterprise IT solutions. Standards for building the enterprise architecture have been lately adopted in order to draw the architectural guidelines for enterprise engineers. This paper opens a series of articles that will provide an overview of frameworks, metamodels and technologies available today for enterprise engineering.enterprise engineering, enterprise architecture frameworks, standards

Enterprise Engineering - A New Organizational Discipline (2)

The e-business ecosystem generates pressure on modern companies to invest massively in technologies that can bring them into the digital world of business. In their race to become a player in the global information system, companies have accumulated many layers of software that, in turn, generated what is now known as the software complexity issue. What is missing in most organizations is a mechanism that can align or “bridge the gap†between the concerns of corporate strategists and IT project managers. As a consequence, a new discipline has evolved, enterprise engineering, to deal with enterprise architectures. The enterprise architecture describes the logical linkages between the enterprise business, information and technical architectures and the enterprise IT solutions. Standards for building the enterprise architecture have been lately adopted in order to draw the architectural guidelines for enterprise engineers. This paper continues a series of articles that will provide an overview of frameworks, metamodels and technologies available today for enterprise engineering.Enterprise Engineering, Business Process Modeling, Enterprise Modeling Standards

Electronic Enterprise Engineering - An Outline of an Architecture

In this paper we put forth a vision for organizations to fully embrace computer support. We propose a business-process oriented architecture for Electronic Enterprise Engineering (EEE) that will enable enterprises to manage and evolve all technological and organizational processes effectively; integrate and manage all enterprise information electronically; and empower knowledge workers at all levels with broad decision support capabilities. Our goal is for the EEE architecture to empower an enterprise to make the best use of its informational assets to operate effectively in this new era of electronic commerce. As part of this project we are developing a standard-based, customizable, integrated tool set called the Support Environment for Enterprise Engineering (SEEE). This paper presents the current SEEE architecture and shouts how it supports the three EEE goals

Comprehensive measurement framework for enterprise architectures

Enterprise Architecture defines the overall form and function of systems across an enterprise involving the stakeholders and providing a framework, standards and guidelines for project-specific architectures. Project-specific Architecture defines the form and function of the systems in a project or program, within the context of the enterprise as a whole with broad scope and business alignments. Application-specific Architecture defines the form and function of the applications that will be developed to realize functionality of the system with narrow scope and technical alignments. Because of the magnitude and complexity of any enterprise integration project, a major engineering and operations planning effort must be accomplished prior to any actual integration work. As the needs and the requirements vary depending on their volume, the entire enterprise problem can be broken into chunks of manageable pieces. These pieces can be implemented and tested individually with high integration effort. Therefore it becomes essential to analyze the economic and technical feasibility of realizable enterprise solution. It is difficult to migrate from one technological and business aspect to other as the enterprise evolves. The existing process models in system engineering emphasize on life-cycle management and low-level activity coordination with milestone verification. Many organizations are developing enterprise architecture to provide a clear vision of how systems will support and enable their business. The paper proposes an approach for selection of suitable enterprise architecture depending on the measurement framework. The framework consists of unique combination of higher order goals, non-functional requirement support and inputs-outcomes pair evaluation. The earlier efforts in this regard were concerned about only custom scales indicating the availability of a parameter in a range.Comment: 22 Page

ClouNS - A Cloud-native Application Reference Model for Enterprise Architects

The capability to operate cloud-native applications can generate enormous business growth and value. But enterprise architects should be aware that cloud-native applications are vulnerable to vendor lock-in. We investigated cloud-native application design principles, public cloud service providers, and industrial cloud standards. All results indicate that most cloud service categories seem to foster vendor lock-in situations which might be especially problematic for enterprise architectures. This might sound disillusioning at first. However, we present a reference model for cloud-native applications that relies only on a small subset of well standardized IaaS services. The reference model can be used for codifying cloud technologies. It can guide technology identification, classification, adoption, research and development processes for cloud-native application and for vendor lock-in aware enterprise architecture engineering methodologies

Modularising the complex meta-models in enterprise systems using conceptual structures

The development of meta-models in Enterprise Modelling, Enterprise Engineering, and Enterprise Architecture enables an enterprise to add value and meet its obligations to its stakeholders. This value is however undermined by the complexity in the meta-models which have become difficult to visualise thus deterring the human-driven process. These experiences have driven the development of layers and levels in the modular meta-model. Conceptual Structures (CS), described as “Information Processing in Mind and Machine”, align the way computers work with how humans think. Using the Enterprise Information Meta-model Architecture (EIMA) as an exemplar, two forms of CS known as Conceptual Graphs (CGs) and Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) are brought together through the CGtoFCA algorithm, thereby mathematically evaluating the effectiveness of the layers and levels in these meta-models. The work reveals the useful contribution that this approach brings in actualising the modularising of complex meta-models in enterprise systems using conceptual structures

Conception fonctionnelle de services d'entreprise fondée sur l'alignement entre coeur de métier et Système d'Information

National audienceThe enterprise organization must fulfil its strategy. Processes describing enterprise business core and enterprise organizational structure enable enterprise to meet this objective. This paper concerns business process driven design of customer oriented services. The description of business processes from customer instead of the production department allows indeed service set providing to the customer by the enterprise. In order to satisfy enterprise objectives, the service design procedure is so based on the Enterprise Architecture (EA) system point of view, whether services are computerized or not. Our service design procedure benefits from EA according to the enterprise strategy realization gap between the target Information System and the business core. This service design procedure adds an enterprise service automated design thanks to model driven engineering to the alignment so defined

An enterprise modeling and integration framework based on knowledge discovery and data mining

This paper deals with the conceptual design and development of an enterprise modeling and integration framework using knowledge discovery and data mining. First, the paper briefly presents the background and current state-of-the-art of knowledge discovery in databases and data mining systems and projects. Next, enterprise knowledge engineering is dealt with. The paper suggests a novel approach of utilizing existing enterprise reference architectures, integration and modeling frameworks by the introduction of new enterprise views such as mining and knowledge views. An extension and a generic exploration of the information view that already exists within some enterprise models are also proposed. The Zachman Framework for Enterprise Architecture is also outlined versus the existing architectures and the proposed enterprise framework. The main contribution of this paper is the identification and definition of a common knowledge enterprise model which represents an original combination between the previous projects on enterprise architectures and the Object Management Group (OMG) models and standards. The identified common knowledge enterprise model has therefore been designed using the OMG's Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) and Common Warehouse MetaModel (CWM), and it also follows the RM-ODP (ISO/OSI). It has been partially implemented in Java(TM), Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) and Corba/IDL. Finally, the advantages and limitations of the proposed enterprise model are outlined

Web Services as Product Experience Augmenters and the Implications for Requirements Engineering: A Position Paper

There is currently little insight into what requirement engineering for web services is and in which context it will be carried out. In this position paper, we investigate requirements engineering for a special kind of web services, namely web services that are used to augment the perceived value of a primary service or product that is itself not a web service. We relate requirements engineering to a common enterprise architecture pattern and derive from this a number of research questions for further study