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

Applying Genre-Based Ontologies to Enterprise Architecture

This paper elaborates the approach of using ontologies as a conceptual base for enterprise architecture (EA) descriptions. The method focuses on recognising and modelling business critical information concepts, their content, and semantics used to operate the business. Communication genres and open and semi-structured information need interviews are used as a domain analysis method. Ontologies aim to explicate the results of domain analysis and to provide a common reference model for Business Information Architecture (BIA) descriptions. The results are generalised to model further aspects of EA

The missing link between product data management and organisational strategies

This article explores interrelationships between the concepts of Product Data Management (PDM), Enterprise Information Architecture (EIA), and enterprise IT strategy in process industries. The initial purpose of the study was to evaluate the capabilities of PDM development, as well as the existence of PDM strategy, to support the development and introduction of EIA in practice. However, the outcome of the study revealed an iterative relation between the concepts forming a hierarchically shaped value chain, here referred to as the PDM/EIA/strategy continuum, that helps in introducing organisational strategic objectives to operational levels as well as in communicating business needs to the top management level. Information drawn from the related literature, combined with reflections from the practitioners, can provide a number of meaningful insights in the use of the PDM/EIA/strategy continuum as a driving force for total information management through organised and real time vertical information sharing

Business Information Driven Approach for EA Development in Practice

In this paper, we extrapolate findings of using the Genre and Ontology based Business Information Architecture Framework (GOBIAF) as a methodology to approach enterprise architecture (EA) development from business perspective. GOBIAF seems to contribute as the first business critical information driven framework for EA development, addressing the importance on integrating (information creation) context to (information) content. GOBIAF was developed for and applied in a knowledge intensive, heterogeneous, and geographically dispersed environment in process industries. In the context, GOBIAF increased our knowledge of complex relationships between business, information, and technical domains. Further, GOBIAF provided needed structure for evaluating and developing difficult and heterogeneous issues in relation to organizational strategies

From Genre-based Ontologies to Business Information Architecture Descriptions

A high cohesion of business and information needed to operate the business provide the fundamental basis for approaching Enterprise Architecture (EA) development. The aim of the Business Information Architecture (BIA) presented in this paper is to support the development of holistic information management principles in geographically dispersed environments. BIA contributes as a shared mechanism to support business information based strategic and operational thinking, forcing isolated business units to become aware of, understand, structure, and present local business critical information using ontologies and communication genres to aid EA development, implementation, and management to support business objectives

A Learning Perspective on Enterprise Architecture Management

Enterprise architecture management (EAM) has long been propagated in research and practice as an approach for keeping local information systems projects in line with enterprise-wide, long-term objectives. EAM literature predominantly promotes strictly governed and centralized coordination mechanisms to achieve the promised alignment contributions. Notwithstanding the increasing maturity levels in practice, organizations still struggle with the successful establishment of EAM, mainly due to the inherent challenges of a firmly centralized approach in complex organizational settings. This study opts for cooperative learning as a theoretical lens to afford a distinctive, non-centralized conceptualization of EAM. We empirically demonstrate EAM as a stage-wise learning process in which knowledge acquisition and cooperative interactions among individuals contribute to project performance on the local level. Projects that benefit from this particular learning process, in turn, are found to significantly leverage enterprise-wide performance