On the Explanatory Capabilities of Enterprise Modeling Approaches

The capability of an enterprise modeling approach to support the provision of knowledge on selected aspects of an enterprise may be apprehended as its explanatory capability. We argue that this capability encompasses two aspects: the capability to represent “the things happening in an enterprise” and the ‘self-explanatory’ capability that relates to the understandability of the approach and the resulting models. In this paper, we propose an analysis framework that can be used to assess the explanatory capabilities of enterprise modeling approaches. The framework is structured according to the four explanatory causes of Aristotle. We demonstrate the applicability of the framework by analyzing three selected enterprise modeling approaches.