Lessons from Facilitating Participatory Enterprise Modeling (Keynote)

Abstract

Enterprise Modeling (EM) has become a widespread activity in enterprises. Strategy development, business process mapping, requirements engineering, product development, enterprise architecture management, information system design are just a few examples of organizational activities that benefit from a model-based way of working and knowledge representation in the form of models. EM helps addressing organizational development from a number of perspectives, such, strategy (goals, challenges, opportunities, capabilities), business operations (processes, actors, resources), information (business concepts, products), information technology (requirements, components), etc. However, to develop efficient solutions and to ensure their fit in the organization all of these perspectives need to be analyzed in an integrated way. Furthermore, EM activities often require involving groups of people, i.e. the models are created in a participatory way. To be efficient, such participatory EM sessions need the support of dedicated persons who know how to organize a modeling project and modeling sessions, how to manage discussions during a modeling session, and what aspects influence the success and efficiency of modeling in practice. This talk will address a number of lessons learned from managing modeling projects and facilitating participatory EM sessions. More specifically, we will focus on the critical success aspects of the EM process, stereotypes of actor behavior in modeling sessions and modeling projects, as well as, patterns and anti-patterns of EM project management