Improving Responsibility modelling in Enterprise Architecture, Case Study in the Healthcare Sector

Economy relies on companies evolving in an increasingly highly regulated environment, having their operations strongly formalised and controlled, and being often organised following a bureaucratic approach. In such a context, new and paramount governance requirements advocate for having the responsibility for business processes and tasks formally defined and assigned to the employees. Without efficient formalisation of the responsibility, these companies face the risk to prevent the satisfactorily delivery of business services and that their image is seriously altered and jeopardised. Hence, among the many challenges related to these new governance requirements is the modelling of the concept of responsibility in a unique and expressive model usable in concrete business situations. Unfortunately, in this domain, we have observed that no (meta)model exists and integrates these new needs yet. The second important requirement is to provide the appropriate rights to the employees following their responsibilities to perform specific tasks. Up to date, no solution, model or method addresses the rights provisioning following this perspective. In this context, the paper proposes firstly to define an expressive Responsibility metamodel in UML, named ReMMo, which allows representing the existing responsibilities at the business layer of the enterprise. Afterwards this Responsibility metamodel is integrated with ArchiMate to enhance its usability and benefits from the enterprise architecture formalism. This integration allows strengthening the semantic of the concepts and relations among concepts from the business layer of the enterprise, and more specially the assignment of rights on business objects to the employees.