Situational Architecture Engineering (SAE) - Improving Strategic Change Through Architecture Methods

Market and environmental requirements call for constant changes in enterprises. To be able to record these changes in a structured way and to manage them it is helpful to use enterprise architectures as stable regulation frameworks. To support the development and the adaptation of the enterprise architectures there are numerous architecture methods (e.g. Zachman Framework, ARIS (Architecture of Integrated Information Systems), TOGAF (The Open Group Architecture Framework), DoDAF (Department of Defense Architecture Framework), BEN (Business Engineering Navigator), Semantic Object Model (SOM)), however, they often lack the necessary flexibility to enable a construction process adaptable to the given situation. This article presents a first approach towards making architecture methods flexible: meta models of the architecture frameworks of selected methods are generated and integrated into a joint meta model. The latter supports the situational adaptability of the enterprise architecture as the architecture method applied has been adapted

Data Quality Problems and Proactive Data Quality Management in Data-Warehouse-Systems

The abstract is included in the text

How to Exploit the Digitalization Potential of Business Processes

Process improvement is the most value-adding activity in the business process management (BPM) lifecycle. Despite mature knowledge, many approaches have been criticized to lack guidance on how to put process improvement into practice. Given the variety of emerging digital technologies, organizations not only face a process improvement black box, but also high uncertainty regarding digital technologies. This paper thus proposes a method that supports organizations in exploiting the digitalization potential of their business processes. To achieve this, action design research and situational method engineering were adopted. Two design cycles involving practitioners (i.e., managers and BPM experts) and end-users (i.e., process owners and participants) were conducted. In the first cycle, the method’s alpha version was evaluated by interviewing practitioners from five organizations. In the second cycle, the beta version was evaluated via real-world case studies. In this paper, detailed results of one case study, which was conducted at a semiconductor manufacturer, are included

Meta Modeling for Business Process Improvement

Conducting business process improvement (BPI) initiatives is a topic of high priority for today’s companies. However, performing BPI projects has become challenging. This is due to rapidly changing customer requirements and an increase of inter-organizational business processes, which need to be considered from an end-to-end perspective. In addition, traditional BPI approaches are more and more perceived as overly complex and too resource-consuming in practice. Against this background, the paper proposes a BPI roadmap, which is an approach for systematically performing BPI projects and serves practitioners’ needs for manageable BPI methods. Based on this BPI roadmap, a domain-specific conceptual modeling method (DSMM) has been developed. The DSMM supports the efficient documentation and communication of the results that emerge during the application of the roadmap. Thus, conceptual modeling acts as a means for purposefully codifying the outcomes of a BPI project. Furthermore, a corresponding software prototype has been implemented using a meta modeling platform to assess the technical feasibility of the approach. Finally, the usability of the prototype has been empirically evaluated

CRM Actions and Processes - Goal-oriented Design based on Relationship Values

In order to realise the potentials of CRM, relationship-specific processes need to be designed and implemented. Yet the following questions still remain: what is the difference between relationship processes and traditional product and transaction-oriented processes and how can relationship processes be identified and designed? Based on business definitions (e.g. how can a customer relationship be maintained?) the authors give first answers to this question by using a systematic, goal-oriented specialisation of generic actions. As an example, one relationship-specific process will be designed in the course of this paper

Identifizierung und Gestaltung neuer CRM-Prozesse

Das Management von Kundenbeziehungen (Customer Relationship Management, CRM) stellt einen zentralen Erfolgsfaktor für Unternehmen dar. In diesem Zusammenhang ergeben sich u. a. folgende Problembereiche: Zum einen ist es notwendig, die relevanten Prozesse des Kundenbeziehungsmanagements zu identifizieren. Zum anderen ist es erforderlich, diese Prozesse an den jeweiligen Kundentyp anzupassen, um so ein effizientes Kundenbeziehungsmanagement zu ermöglichen. Der Beitrag greift diese Problembereiche auf und stellt einen Ansatz zur Identifizierung neuer, beziehungsorientierter Prozesse vor, der auf den Konstrukten »generische Aktivitäten«, »Kundenlebenszyklus« und »Kundenmotive« basiert. Am Beispiel des »aufgeklärten Kundentyps« wird der Rückgewinnungsprozess näher erläutert, und der im Beitrag vorgeschlagene Ansatz wird anhand eines Praxisbeispiels veranschaulicht. Die dargestellte Vorgehensweise ermöglicht es nicht nur – wie es häufig der Fall ist –, die Unternehmenssicht einzubeziehen, sondern auch die Kundensicht beim Management von Beziehungen zu berücksichtigen. Zudem wird gezeigt, wie generische Strukturen die Identifizierung von Abläufen unterstützen können und wie durch Spezialisierung der generischen Prozesse (auf einen bestimmten Kundentyp) konkrete Handlungsanweisungen abgeleitet werden können

Gestaltung hybrider Wertschöpfung mittels Architekturen - Analyse am Beispiel des Business Engineering

Mehr denn je sind Unternehmen im zunehmenden Wettbewerb dazu gezwungen, Differenzierungsstrategien zu etablieren. Die Generierung innovativer Leistungsbündel bestehend aus materiellen und immateriellen Leistungsbestandteilen ist eine solche Strategie und wird als „hybride Wertschöpfung" bezeichnet. Um Unternehmen bei ihrer Veränderung zum hybriden Lösungsanbieter zu unterstützen, werden Vorgehensweisen und Techniken benötigt, welche in eine formgebende Struktur eingebettet sind. Architekturen sind solche Hilfsmittel, die eine strukturierte Veränderung von Unternehmen unterstützen können. Die Zielsetzung des Beitrags ist es zu identifizieren, welche Anforderungen an eine Architektur für hybride Wertschöpfung zu stellen sind und inwieweit die Architektur des St. Galler Business Engineering diese Anforderungen erfüllt. The increasing competition forces enterprises to establish differentiation strategies more than ever. The creation of innovative bundles, consisting of material and immaterial elements, is such a strategy and known as "hybrid value creation". In order to support enterprises during their change towards a hybrid solution supplier, procedures and techniques are needed which are embedded in a certain structure. Architecture Frameworks can support such a structured transformation of enterprises. The intention of the paper is to identify requirements for architectures for hybrid value creation and to check these requirements by using the St. Gallen Business Engineering Framework