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2009 | Buch

Advances in Enterprise Engineering III

5th International Workshop, CIAO! 2009, and 5th International Workshop, EOMAS 2009, held at CAiSE 2009, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, June 8-9, 2009. Proceedings

herausgegeben von: Antonia Albani, Joseph Barjis, Jan L. G. Dietz

Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg

Buchreihe : Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing

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Über dieses Buch

In the era of continuous changes in internal organizationalsettings and external business environments – such as new regulations and business opportunities – modern enterprises are subject to extensive research and study. For the understanding, design, and engineering of modern enterprises and theircomplexbusiness processes,thedisciplineofenterpriseengineeringrequires sound engineering principles and systematic approaches based on rigorous th- ries. Along with that, a paradigm shift seems to be needed for addressing these issues adequately. The main paradigm shift is the consideration of an enterprise and its business processes as a social system. In its social setting, an enterprise and its business processes represent actors with certain authorities and assigned roles, who assume certain responsibilities in order to provide a service to its environment. Second to that, a paradigm shift is to look at an enterprise as an artifact purposefully designed for a certain mission and goal. The need for this paradigm shift, along with the complexity and agility of modern enterprises, gives inspiration for the emerging discipline of enterprise engineering that requires development of new theories and methodologies. To this end, the prominent methods and tools of modeling and simulation play a signi?cant role. Both (conceptual) modeling and simulation are widely used for understanding, analyzing, and engineering an enterprise (its organization and business processes).

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Modeling and Simulation

Method Versus Model – Two Sides of the Same Coin?
Abstract
This article analyzes the state-of-the-art regarding the development of generic methods and reference models. The analysis shows that the related research disciplines, method engineering and reference modeling, tend to converge. Furthermore, it shows that the differentiation between generic methods and reference models should not be maintained because both artifact types feature activity-oriented elements as well as result-oriented elements. Depending on the artifact type, however, generic methods and reference models vary regarding the relative importance of the activity view and the result view. A generic problem solution (generic term for methods and reference models) can be interpreted as a sequence of activities which aim at the development of results. The insights into the commonalities among generic problem solutions provide the opportunity to define a unified design process in the field of design science research. Implications and unification challenges that are related to such a unified design process are presented at the end of the paper.
Robert Winter, Anke Gericke, Tobias Bucher
Capturing Complex Business Processes Interdependencies Using Modeling and Simulation in a Multi-actor Environment
Abstract
Current business processes tend to become increasingly complex as a result of extensive interdependencies with partner organizations and the increasing use of technology for decision making in multi-actor environments. This complexity often grows to the extent that none of the involved actors is able to have a total overview of the complete end-to-end processes. An example of such a complex process is the application process of new merchants to obtain the possibility to accept electronic payments. Although static modeling of such a process can reveal valuable information about the structure and organization of business processes and the relation with the involved actors, a simulation model can provide more insight into behavior of the business system. With this knowledge the possible bottlenecks and problems within this process can be found, and then used to improve the business system resulting in an improved customer satisfaction. This paper describes the set-up of this simulation model and its use for finding efficient policy measures for involved actors.
Jessica W. Sun, Joseph Barjis, Alexander Verbraeck, Marijn Janssen, Jacco Kort
A Heuristic Method for Business Process Model Evaluation
Abstract
In this paper, we present a heuristic approach for finding errors and possible improvements in business process models. First, we translate the information that is included in a model into a set of Prolog facts. We then search for patterns which are related to a violation of the soundness property, bad modeling style or otherwise give raise to the assumption that the model should be improved. By testing our approach on a large repository of real-world models, we found that the heuristic approach identifies violations of the soundness property almost as accurate as model-checkers that explore the state space of all possible executions of the model. Other than these tools, our approach never ran into state-space explosion problems. Furthermore, our pattern system can also detect patterns for bad modeling style which can help to improve the quality of the models.
Volker Gruhn, Ralf Laue
Simulating Liquidity in Value and Supply Chains
Abstract
This paper provides an ontology-based set of Petri-nets for simulating the effect of business process changes on an organisation’s liquidity, and demonstrates that certain types of business process redesign can increase or reduce the amount of external funding that is required to prevent an organisation from defaulting on its debt. This debt defaulting may lead to proliferating liquidity constraints for subsequent supply chain partners. Consequently, this paper provides a proper toolkit for assessing and mitigating the propagation of liquidity constraints in supply chains. The paper uses the accounting-based Resource-Event-Agent ontology to create workflow patterns for modelling exchanges between supply chain partners and for the value chains that represent an organisation’s internal processes. Both the exchange and internal processes continuously convert money into resources and vice versa. These models for money to resource and resource to money conversions are then used for constructing supply chain models for liquidity modelling and analysis.
Wim Laurier, Geert Poels

Enterprise Architecture and Governance

Complexity Levels of Representing Dynamics in EA Planning
Abstract
Enterprise Architecture (EA) models provide information on the fundamental as-is structure of a company or governmental agency and thus serve as an informational basis for informed decisions in enterprise transformation projects. At the same time EA models provide a means to develop and visualize to-be states in the EA planning process. Results of a literature review and implications from industry practices show that existing EA planning processes do not sufficiently cover dynamic aspects in EA planning. This paper conceptualizes seven levels of complexity for structuring EA planning dynamics by a system of interrelated as-is and to-be models. While level 1 represents the lowest complexity with non-connected as-is and to-be models, level 7 covers a multi-period planning process also taking plan deviations during transformation phases into account. Based on these complexity levels, a multi-stage evolution of EA planning processes is proposed which develops non-dynamic as-is EA modeling into full-scale EA planning.
Stephan Aier, Bettina Gleichauf, Jan Saat, Robert Winter
An Approach for Creating and Managing Enterprise Blueprints: A Case for IT Blueprints
Abstract
One important role of Enterprise Architecture aims at modeling enterprise artifacts and their relationships, ranging from the high-level concepts to physical ones such as communication networks and enterprise premises. As it is well known, these artifacts evolve over time, as well as their relationships. The dynamic nature of such artifacts has been a difficulty not only in modeling but also in keeping enterprise blueprints updated. This paper presents our approach to handle blueprints of the Enterprise Architecture, based on several years and projects in large organizations, both in the financial and telecommunication industry.
We started by considering “projects” as the changing elements of Enterprise artifacts and achieve a scenario where blueprints are automatically generated and updated, and a time bar allows traveling from the past (AS-WAS), to the present (AS-IS) and to the future scenarios (TO-BE). The paper also presents an overview of the underlying model, the applied methodology and the blueprints that we found to be a valuable instrument amongst elements of different communities: Project Management, IT Governance and IT Architecture. In spite that the cases studies are targeted to the IT domain, the lessons are valid for other architectural areas.
Pedro Sousa, José Lima, André Sampaio, Carla Pereira
An Information Model Capturing the Managed Evolution of Application Landscapes
Abstract
Projects are the executors of organizational change and hence in charge of the managed evolution of the application landscape in the context of enterprise architecture (EA) management. Although the aforementioned fact is widely agreed upon, no generally accepted information model addressing the challenges arising in the context of future planning and historization of management decisions concerning projects yet exists. This paper addresses this challenge by identifying requirements regarding an information model for linking projects and application landscape management concepts from an extensive survey, during which the demands from practitioners and the existing tool support for EA management were analyzed. Furthermore, we discuss the shortcomings of existing approaches to temporal landscape management in literature and propose an information model capable of addressing the identified requirements by taking related modeling techniques from nearby disciplines into account.
Sabine Buckl, Alexander M. Ernst, Florian Matthes, Christian M. Schweda

Enterprise Engineering – Applications

A Service Specification Framework for Developing Component-Based Software: A Case Study at the Port of Rotterdam
Abstract
This paper describes the results of a case study conducted at the Port of Rotterdam, the largest port in Europe. The goal of the case study is to evaluate our Enterprise Ontology-based service specification framework for its use in component-based software development projects. During a Rational Unified Process (RUP)-project at the Port of Rotterdam we specified the required services for the first iterations using this framework. The framework contributed to early error discovery and awareness of important, but often overlooked, service aspects. Overall the service specification framework fulfilled the needs of the project, though some findings led to improvements in our framework.
Linda Terlouw, Kees Eveleens Maarse
Enhancing the Formal Foundations of BPMN by Enterprise Ontology
Abstract
Recently, business processes are receiving more attention as process-centric representations of an enterprise. This paper focuses on the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), that is becoming an industry standard. However, BPMN has some drawbacks such as the lack of formal semantics, limited potential for verification, and ambiguous description of the constructs. Also the ontology used to model is mostly kept implicit. As a result, BPMN models may be ambiguous, inconsistent or incomplete. In order to overcome these limitations, a contribution to BPMN is proposed by applying the way of thinking of DEMO; the explicit specified Enterprise ontology axioms and the rigid modeling methodology of DEMO. Adding the ontological concepts which, in DEMO, are translated into a coherent set of modeling symbols, may result in formal, unambiguous BPMN business process models. As such BPMN can be enriched on several aspects like the diagnosis, consistency, and optimalization of business processes.
Dieter Van Nuffel, Hans Mulder, Steven Van Kervel
Developing Quality Management Systems with DEMO
Abstract
The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has defined Quality Management, but it has not yet adopted standards for developing Quality Management Systems (QMSs), notably not for modeling business processes in this context. Consequently a variety of modeling techniques are in use. Most of these are not able to produce concise and comprehensive models, whereas these features are particularly important for QMSs. Moreover, these techniques appear to be based on the mechanistic paradigm, meaning that they are task oriented instead of human oriented. Various researches indicate that this leads, among other things, to alienating employees from their work. DEMO (Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations) has both desirable features: it is human oriented and it produces concise and comprehensive models of business processes, since it is based on the systemic notion of enterprise ontology. This paper reports on the theoretical evaluation of DEMO for the purpose of developing QMSs, as well as on practical experiences in applying DEMO to it.
Jos Geskus, Jan Dietz
Analyzing Organizational Structures Using Social Network Analysis
Abstract
Technological changes have aided modern companies to gather enormous amounts of data electronically. The availability of electronic data has exploded within the past decade as communication technologies and storage capacities have grown tremendously. The need to analyze this collected data for creating business intelligence and value continues to grow rapidly as more and more apparently unbiased information can be extracted from these data sets. In this paper we focus in particular, on email corpuses, from which a great deal of information can be discerned about organization structure and their unique cultures. We hypothesize that a broad based analysis of information exchanges (ex. emails) among a company’s employees could give us deep information about their respective roles within the organization, thereby revealing hidden organizational structures that hold immense intrinsic value. Enron email corpus is used as a case study to predict the unknown status of Enron employees and identify homogeneous groups of employees and hierarchy among them within Enron organization. We achieve this by using classification and cluster techniques. As a part of this work, we have also developed a web-based graphical user interface to work with feature extraction and composition.
Chuanlei Zhang, William B. Hurst, Rathinasamy B. Lenin, Nurcan Yuruk, Srini Ramaswamy

DEMO – Dissemination and Extension

The Adoption of DEMO: A Research Agenda
Abstract
Organizations are confronted with increasingly complex and dynamic environments. Methodologies in the area of enterprise architecture claim to provide the necessary agility in order to prevail in these environments. The DEMO methodology is one of the few promising methodologies in this area. The need for this type of methodology is now quickly increasing. Research has, however, shown that adoption of methodologies by organizations is often problematic. As a result, notwithstanding their benefits, many methodologies do not diffuse as expected. Moreover, little research has in fact studied the adoption of methodologies. In this paper, we argue that research on the adoption of DEMO is therefore a useful topic that may identify ways to stimulate the acceptance of DEMO. We therefore provide a research agenda on the adoption of DEMO that is firmly grounded in the adoption of innovations literature.
Kris Ven, Jan Verelst
ArchiMate and DEMO – Mates to Date?
Abstract
ArchiMate is an approach to modeling the architecture of enterprises. In the corresponding architecture framework, three enterprise layers are distinguished: business, application and technology. Although ArchiMate is broadly applied in practice, its semantics appears to be undefined. DEMO is a methodology for enterprise engineering that is facing a rapidly growing acceptance. It is firmly rooted in a sound and appropriate theoretical basis. DEMO also distinguishes between three enterprise layers: ontological, infological and datalogical. This paper reports on a theoretical and practical comparative evaluation of ArchiMate and DEMO. Only the business layer of ArchiMate and the ontological layer of DEMO are considered. Three conclusions are drawn. First, the two approaches are hardly comparable since ArchiMate belongs to the second and DEMO to the third wave of approaches. Second, the business layer of ArchiMate corresponds to all three layers of DEMO, without a possibility to distinguish between them. Third, ArchiMate could benefit from adopting DEMO as its front-end approach, thereby enforcing the rigorously defined semantics of DEMO on the Archimate models.
Roland Ettema, Jan L. G. Dietz
Integration Aspects between the B/I/D Organizations of the Enterprise
Abstract
The enterprise can be considered as a heterogeneous system consisting of three homogeneous systems, called the B(usiness)-organization, the I(nformation)-organization and the D(ata)-organization. The D-organization supports the I-organization and the I-organization supports the B-organization. Those three organizations are linked to each other through the cohesive unification of the human being. However, from the construction point of view it is unclear how the interactions between actors of the different layers in the enterprise are taken place. This paper contributes to more clearness about this interface by elaborating some integration aspects between the mentioned layers more in detail.
Joop de Jong
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Advances in Enterprise Engineering III
herausgegeben von
Antonia Albani
Joseph Barjis
Jan L. G. Dietz
Copyright-Jahr
2009
Verlag
Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Electronic ISBN
978-3-642-01915-9
Print ISBN
978-3-642-01914-2
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-01915-9