Enterprise Process Modeling in Practice – Experiences from a Case Study in the Healthcare Sector

In enterprise modeling it is customary to differentiate between the current, as-is situation and the future to-be situation and develop models of these to plan for how to fill the gap. In practice you are never able to implement the ideal to-be model, each to-be will be incremental steps on the way to a future best practice. So it will be useful to also maintain a separate ought-to-be model, to not forget the situation you strive for. A distinction between the ought-to-be, as-is, and the to-be model is necessary, and we have in this paper provided the basis for an approach for combining top-down ought-to-be and bottom-up as-is and to-be modelling to support the dynamic interplay between these models. The approach is illustrated through a practical application in the healthcare sector. The main results is that it is found beneficial to represent the to-be and ought-to-be models separately, to be able to discuss the long-term goals without being hampered by short-term technical and organizational limitations, but still have support for developing the next version of the organization.