An Intentional Perspective on Enterprise Modeling - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 210

An Intentional Perspective on Enterprise
Modeling

Janis Bubenko Jr., Anne Persson, and Janis Stirna

Abstract Enterprise Modeling (EM) has two main purposes: (1) Developing the
business, which entails developing business vision, strategies, redesigning the way
the business operates, developing the supporting information systems, etc., and
(2) ensuring the quality of the business where the focus is on sharing the knowledge
about the business, its vision and the way it operates, and ensuring the acceptance
of business decisions through committing the stakeholders to the decisions made.
In addition, EM has also shown to be useful as a general tool for articulating, dis-
cussing, and solving organizational problems. Based on a number of case studies,
interviews and observations this chapter defines what is required from EM when
adopted for these purposes and intentions respectively. More precisely, it addresses
the following types of requirements: documents and models required as input, mod-
els that should be developed, requirements on the modeling language, requirements
on the modeling process, tool requirements and model quality requirements. The
defined requirements are then discussed taking a specific EM method, Enterprise
Knowledge Development (EKD) as example.

1 Introduction

Enterprise Modeling (EM), or Business Modeling, has for many years been a central
theme in information systems (IS) engineering research and a number of different
methods have been proposed. Examples of EMmethods can be found in [1 -3, 7- 10,
13, 16, 35] . Examples of application domains for EM can be found in [ 5, 6, 12, 17,
29, 31- 33] .
The application of EM is heavily influenced by a large number of situational fac-
tors, one of which is the intention behind its use [ 20] .We argue that knowledge about
these intentions is essential when making decisions about which method, way of