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Abstract:
Increased market dynamics, shorter product lifecycles and a higher customer involvement in product design have caused great changes to competitive conditions and many companies are confronted with the challenge of becoming interoperable.
Becoming interoperable tackles a lot of areas within an enterprise (e.g. organizational structures, processes etc.) and the problem for most enterprises consist in identifying their weaknesses and strengths concerning their interoperability capabilities.
Enterprise models have the goal to reduce complexity and give a representation of structures, activities, processes, information, resources, people and behavior of an enterprise and the dependencies between them.
Especially for enterprise collaborations, models help to understand each other, to plan, implement and to support interactions.
But most companies are not ready yet to harvest the benefits of enterprise modeling and fail in establishing model based collaborations.
In the frame of enterprise integration and user oriented enterprise modeling this paper introduces an approach that supports enterprise stakeholders to implement enterprise modeling within collaborative companies.
One objective is to present an approach that enables companies to get the most effect out of enterprise modeling in a collaborative environment based on the maturity of their organization relative to modeling.
Further on, an enterprise modeling based establishment methodology will be presented which enables companies to understand and manage their current enterprise interoperability maturity.
The methodology will describe discrete levels of interoperability improvement based on the successive adoption of good enterprise modeling practices in the different enterprise dimensions.
Situation:
In the last couple of years, enterprise modeling has become a very important success factor [1]. Modeling is a matter of handling views and of balancing parameters and values calculated by engineers from different disciplines, who collaborate and come up with the best choice by mutual agreement [2].
Nowadays, an enterprise has to be flexible and adaptable to new market situations [3], i.e. global markets and trade, alliances and business communities, new concepts of cooperation and collaboration, maturing technologies and standardization and new approaches towards industrial computing.
Enterprise models have the goal to reduce the complexity and give a representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people, behavior, and goals of an enterprise and the dependencies between them.
At least an enterprise model is able to reflect the entire enterprise architecture independent from the kind of architectures like Zachmann [4].
Especially for the several types of enterprise collaborations from simple buyer-seller interactions to virtual enterprises, models help to understand each other, to plan, implement and to support interactions. But a lot of companies which have introduced modeling technologies still have to deal with several problems.
Actually, too much time is needed to create a complete model, and, when finished, the developed model does not reflect the reality in a proper way anymore.
Further on, the models often do not fit users’ requirements, e.g. the model is not detailed enough or the level of formalization is not appropriate.
This causes that most of the modeling results do not support the daily business of employees, because in most cases users do not have the skills to read enterprise models properly and to deduce the implications for their work.
Enterprises which have to collaborate with each other face additional problems when they are up to interoperate seamlessly within a networked organization and willing to use enterprise modeling as support.
The Enterprise modeling approach is different for each enterprise, depending on its current practices, systems, knowledge and culture.
Thus, enterprises need to understand how to improve the way they use enterprise modeling in order to improve and leverage their capability and ability to interoperate, i.e. their current enterprise interoperability maturity and the path to improve it.
A path to adopt an enterprise modeling approach towards interoperability is required in order to improve competitiveness in a more and more complex enterprise environment.
In the European Integrated Project ATHENA (Advanced Technologies for Interoperability of Heterogeneous Enterprise Networks and their Application) concepts are proposed in order to solve these problems [5].
The results of the sub-project A1 “Enterprise Modeling in the context of collaborative enterprises” are presented in this paper.
The content will also be used for the PhD thesis of Thomas Knothe and Timo Kahl.
Enterprise Interoperability Maturity Model:
Conclusion:
The Framework for the Establishment of Enterprise Modeling in the Context of Collaborative Enterprises and their components presented in this paper (the EIMM and Maturity Assessment, A Method for Deducing the adequate Modeling Approach, the Mapping Method and the Establishment Approach) has as goal to improve the utilization of enterprise modeling in order to enable enterprises to have efficient collaboration with each other.
The application of these concepts allows enterprises:
To create enterprise models for improving the interoperability capabilities in short time with using a modeling approach that is adapted to the specific enterprise requirements,
To keep the developed models alive and to use them to support daily business of employees and
To follow incremental and thus more controllable approaches for applying enterprise modeling in order to improve business.
The selected use case is showing that the establishment framework is complementary to the existing tool and language specific approaches.
The methodology is now already applied in several industrial use cases in automotive, real estate and telecommunication sector.
But for having a stable set of empirical data more cases have to be executed.
However a first view may indicate to have an additional concept which leads to an increased complexity. But in fact this approach will reduce complexity because it:
Limits the level of detail for each model according to purpose and enterprise capability and skills,
Provides easy applicable metrics for deducing the right approach and
Comes up with a solution for maturity assessment which is already successfully used for software engineering and other application domains and will guide through the “jungle” of approaches for enterprise modeling.
Admittedly the concepts of the Framework for the Establishment of Enterprise Modeling in a collaborative environment have to be extended in the context of specifying of their details.
For example some issues are:
Instantiation of the morphologic box with best practices and reference elements,
Analysis of dependencies of the elements in the morphologic box and elaboration of rules for solving conflicts and
Refining customizing rules in the mapping method according to the elements of the morphologic box.
An important issue is to define the templates and rules for applying the approach for the Establishment Framework of Enterprise Modeling according to specific enterprise challenges.
That means, the EIMM as well as the deducing procedure have to be extended according to the specific conditions of these challenges.
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