Enterprise modelling

Enterprise modelling is the abstract representation, description and definition of the structure, processes, information and resources of an identifiable business, government body, or other large organization. Enterprise modelling is the abstract representation, description and definition of the structure, processes, information and resources of an identifiable business, government body, or other large organization. It deals with the process of understanding an organization and improving its performance through creation and analysis of enterprise models. This includes the modelling of the relevant business domain (usually relatively stable), business processes (usually more volatile), and uses of information technology within the business domain and its processes. Enterprise modelling is the process of building models of whole or part of an enterprise with process models, data models, resource models and or new ontologies etc. It is based on knowledge about the enterprise, previous models and/or reference models as well as domain ontologies using model representation languages. An enterprise in general is a unit of economic organization or activity. These activities are required to develop and deliver products and/or services to a customer. An enterprise includes a number of functions and operations such as purchasing, manufacturing, marketing, finance, engineering, and research and development. The enterprise of interest are those corporate functions and operations necessary to manufacture current and potential future variants of a product. The term 'enterprise model' is used in industry to represent differing enterprise representations, with no real standardized definition. Due to the complexity of enterprise organizations, a vast number of differing enterprise modelling approaches have been pursued across industry and academia. Enterprise modelling constructs can focus upon manufacturing operations and/or business operations; however, a common thread in enterprise modelling is an inclusion of assessment of information technology. For example, the use of networked computers to trigger and receive replacement orders along a material supply chain is an example of how information technology is used to coordinate manufacturing operations within an enterprise. The basic idea of enterprise modelling according to Ulrich Frank is 'to offer different views on an enterprise, thereby providing a medium to foster dialogues between various stakeholders - both in academia and in practice. For this purpose they include abstractions suitable for strategic planning, organisational (re-) design and software engineering. The views should complement each other and thereby foster a better understanding of complex systems by systematic abstractions. The views should be generic in the sense that they can be applied to any enterprise. At the same time they should offer abstractions that help with designing information systems which are well integrated with a company's long term strategy and its organisation. Hence, enterprise models can be regarded as the conceptual infrastructure that support a high level of integration.' Enterprise modelling has its roots in systems modelling and especially information systems modelling. One of the earliest pioneering works in modelling information systems was done by Young and Kent (1958), who argued for 'a precise and abstract way of specifying the informational and time characteristics of a data processing problem'. They wanted to create 'a notation that should enable the analyst to organize the problem around any piece of hardware'. Their work was a first effort to create an abstract specification and invariant basis for designing different alternative implementations using different hardware components. A next step in IS modelling was taken by CODASYL, an IT industry consortium formed in 1959, who essentially aimed at the same thing as Young and Kent: the development of 'a proper structure for machine independent problem definition language, at the system level of data processing'. This led to the development of a specific IS information algebra. The first methods dealing with enterprise modelling emerged in the 1970s. They were the entity-relationship approach of Peter Chen (1976) and SADT of Douglas T. Ross (1977), the one concentrate on the information view and the other on the function view of business entities. These first methods have been followed end 1970s by numerous methods for software engineering, such as SSADM, Structured Design, Structured Analysis and others. Specific methods for enterprise modelling in the context of Computer Integrated Manufacturing appeared in the early 1980s. They include the IDEF family of methods (ICAM, 1981) and the GRAI method by Guy Doumeingts in 1984 followed by GRAI/GIM by Doumeingts and others in 1992. These second generation of methods were activity-based methods which have been surpassed on the one hand by process-centred modelling methods developed in the 1990s such as Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS), CIMOSA and Integrated Enterprise Modeling (IEM). And on the other hand by object-oriented methods, such as Object-oriented analysis (OOA) and Object-modelling technique (OMT). An enterprise model is a representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people, behavior, goals, and constraints of a business, government, or other enterprises. Thomas Naylor (1970) defined a (simulation) model as 'an attempt to describe the interrelationships among a corporation's financial, marketing, and production activities in terms of a set of mathematical and logical relationships which are programmed into the computer.' These interrelationships should according to Gershefski (1971) represent in detail all aspects of the firm including 'the physical operations of the company, the accounting and financial practices followed, and the response to investment in key areas' Programming the modelled relationships into the computer is not always necessary: enterprise models, under different names, have existed for centuries and were described, for example, by Adam Smith, Walter Bagehot, and many others.