Abstract:
The epitome of the modern enterprise is a large scale, geographically dispersed, complex entity.
It interacts with other enterprises, perhaps large numbers of them, in many different locations, often with great frequency.
It serves highly competitive markets, which may shift in a matter of days or weeks.
Designing, planning, managing, and controlling the modern enterprise requires a supporting infrastructure that is capable, adaptable, understandable, and usable.
While not all enterprises share all these characteristics, almost all enterprises are affected by the associated business processes and technologies.
Over the past decade, Enterprise Modeling, or EM, has emerged as a response to the needs of those charged with designing and maintaining the enterprise infrastructure, and EM could well become the platform for developing not only enterprise infrastructure, but all enterprise decision support.
As a result, EM may be a powerful enabler (or inhibitor) of enterprise transformation.
This paper provides an introduction to EM, a brief history of its evolution, and an assessment of EM from an enterprise transformation perspective.
Introduction:
This paper is about large, typically global enterprises – enterprises that are simply too complex for one person to know everything important about them – and about a particular technological response to the needs of owners, managers, employees, customers, and suppliers to understand and interact in and with such enterprises.
That technological response is enterprise modeling or EM, a loosely defined, emerging discipline focused on developing formal models of the enterprise as tools to use in decision making, and especially in designing and implementing software systems that support enterprise operations.
According to Popkin Software [28] EM “extends understanding of the organization by modeling its constituent parts, and allowing analysis of the ways in which various corporate processes function and interact.
This directly supports the investigation and construction of extended, revised or redesigned processes which will further the needs of the business.”
Clearly, the goals of EM are closely related to the themes of enterprise transformation.
EM is not an easy topic to condense into a few pages – it is emerging from the work of professionals in many different disciplines, coming from different cultures.
What I will attempt in this paper is to answer the following questions:
What is contemporary EM and what are its origins?
Why are contemporary EM methods and tools inadequate to support enterprise transformation?
What new capabilities are required for EM methods and tools to be useful in supporting enterprise transformation?
In order to give a reasonable treatment to these questions, I will start with a brief discussion of modeling, a brief discussion of the concept of “enterprise,” and a brief description of enterprise transformation.
A Challenge:
Enterprise transformation has never been more important than it is in today’s highly competitive global marketplace.
Given the risks and rewards associated with enterprise transformation, appropriate enterprise modeling concepts and tools would be of great value.
How would such concepts and tools differ from contemporary EM languages?
First, there is a need for an enterprise modeling ontology that begins from the perspective of the enterprise, rather than the perspective of enterprise models.
If the syntax of a modeling language is alien to enterprise decision makers, the language is unlikely to find wide adoption.
Rather than force enterprise decision makers to think in the terms that computer scientists might use to describe their models of the enterprise, why not develop a syntax and semantics that draw from the decision maker’s existing knowledge of the enterprise?
Keeping in mind Rouse’s [32] formulation of enterprise transformation, it is important that enterprise modeling concepts and tools have the capability to address the key elements of the enterprise environment, the resource portfolio, the network of activities (including controls), the products, the organization, and the economics of the enterprise.
For a particular purpose, not all these capabilities may be needed.
For example, if the contemplated transformation is applied to a specific work process for the purpose of making it twice as fast and half as expensive, then issues of products and organization may not be important.
Second, to be useful in enterprise modeling, concepts and tools must support multiple scales of resolution.
The model of a supply chain should be useful to the decision maker without requiring a high fidelity description of all the rolling stock, all the operating policies, and all the work practices.
At the same time, the model should be one that can be elaborated in a consistent manner to incorporate those details, if they are needed to support detailed design of the transformed enterprise, or detailed planning of the transformation.
Ideally, the same syntax and semantics that work at the machine cell level should work at the enterprise level.
Third, to be useful in enterprise modeling, concepts and tools must address risk and uncertainty.
This is much more than simply providing a capability for Monte Carlo simulation.
Often, there is only the knowledge that the outcome is unknown, without any reasonable way to estimate a probability distribution for the outcome.
This is a fact of life for enterprise transformation, and concepts and tools that aim to support enterprise transformation must address this issue.
Finally, contemporary EM languages are very software solution centric, i.e., their functions and capabilities are designed to support the development of software solutions.
Often, what makes enterprise transformation difficult is not the supporting software but the human roles and relationships involved.
Enterprise modeling concepts and tools that do not enable the integration of human issues in the modeling of the resources and activity networks will not meet the needs of enterprise transformation leaders.
Models are fundamental to the progress of technology and to the design, planning, and operation of contemporary enterprises.
The challenge presented here is to develop a new generation of EM concepts and tools that address the needs of needs of enterprise transformation decision makers.