The enterprise DNA : static and dynamic digital representation of organizations

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Data Science and Advanced AnalyticsThe contemporary business environment become more complex and fast changing during processes of business globalization, technical progress, competition, accumulation and sharing of knowledge. Companies arise, grow, exchange ideas, merge, interact with each other and adapt to the market environment, and, finally, some of them disappear. Their behavior determined by sophisticated laws, that cannot be discovered in isolation, because existence of each entity depends on its specific, internal properties and the interplay with other participants of the market. The complex interactions and enterprise life cycle reminds the life of species in the nature and thus, the mimic of biological entities can be applied as a modelling tool for better understanding how company works and what makes it successful. The broad purpose of this work is to create foundation for applying Artificial Life simulation for business analysis. Artificial Life is a concept that allow to mimic biological evolution and behavior of living creatures for modelling complex systems, forming specific environment with interacting and evolving agents. Thus, the Artificial Life can be applied for the analysis of the enterprise on the competitive market for studying its success factors. Possible combination of factors and their value are company- specific and represent properties that affects performance of the organization. The enterprises can exchange their characteristics with others by means of stuff swap, consulting, merging etc., acquiring best practices and becoming more adapted for specific challenges. The main goal of this paper is the research and suggestion of such characteristics and their representation, which, by analogy with biology, will constitute Enterprise DNA. In this thesis the digital representation of the Enterprise DNA inspired by the biological notion of living organism’s DNA is proposed. As the foundation of important company’s features, the Enterprise Architecture concept was applied. Despite the fact, that it was previously used for an Information Technology architecture, this discipline was evolved to more broad science and became a tool for describing the business architecture of the company. The Zachman Enterprise Architecture framework used as a basis of enterprise representation. Regarding this tool, the artifacts for phenotype representation are proposed and then, their digital XML representation found. The DNA digital representation model (genotype) for artifacts is proposed, which can be used for further evaluation of fitness of the specific company to the competitive environment on the specific market. This representation can be used by means of Genetic Algorithm for further implementation of Artificial Life simulation on real company’s data. The evaluation by the experts showed perspectivity of the idea of applying ALife modelling for solving business problems. As a result, some ideas for model improvement are discovered