An Intentional Perspective on Enterprise Modeling - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 212

One deals with developing the business , e.g. developing business vision, strate-
gies, redesigning business operations, developing the supporting information sys-
tems, etc. The other deals with ensuring the quality of the business, primarily
focusing on two issues: (1) sharing the knowledge about the business, its vision, and
the way it operates, and (2) ensuring the acceptance of business decisions through
committing the stakeholders to the decisions made. We later added a third sub-goal
on the top level - using EM as a problem solving tool , where EM is only used for
supporting the discussion among a group of stakeholders trying to analyze a specific
problem at hand. In the following three sections these sub-goals will be discussed
in more detail.

2.1 Business Development

Business development is one of the most common purposes of EM. It frequently
involves change management - determining how to achieve visions and objec-
tives from the current state in organizations. EM is often used in this process with
great success. Some more specific issues can be found in the following interview
quotation : 1
... questions like strategies, what type of market to participate in, how is the market struc-

tured, which are our clients, who are the other interested parties in the organization, how
should we structure our work sequencing, how do we structure our products comparing
with the clients, and do we sell everything to everyone. EM also aims to describe the reason
for the organization, the goals - to relate them to the strategies, to the business idea. EM
continues all the way from the strategies through the processes, through the concepts - in
order to arrive at a complete picture, or a picture that fits together. (i1 in [ 27] )

Business process orientation is a specific case of business development - the
organization wants to restructure/redesign its business operations.
One of the main reasons for doing Business Modeling is business process orientation of the
organization. In this case you need to describe in some graphical form what business do we
have and what business we would like to have. That to my experience is one of the main
reasons to hire consultants or to invest in methods and tools and various other things. (i2 in
[ 27] )
Also, EM is commonly used in the early stages of system development. See
e.g. [ 4] . A common view among business consultants is that EM is effective for
gathering the business needs and high-level requirements.

In my experience, the most common modeling I have been doing, has been connected in
some way to IT development. There has always been a superior decision of doing something
in the IT sphere, which has led to the need to understand the business better and describe
it much better, otherwise we can't build the right system. That is very often the situation.
On the other hand I have not been very much involved in the rest of the IT development.
I have just delivered the results - this is the business, this is how it's working, this is the

1 Note that the quotations from this point onward are excerpts from the interviews. Full transcripts
of the interviews are available from the authors on request.