An Intentional Perspective on Enterprise Modeling - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 214

2.3 Using EM as a Problem Solving Tool
In some cases making an EM activity can be helpful when capturing, delimiting,
and analyzing the initial problem situation and in order to decide on a course of
action. In such cases EM is mostly used as a problem solving and communication
tool. The enterprise model created during this type of modeling is mostly used for
documenting the discussion and the decisions made.
[in some cases] you can throw [the models] away - they might just have been a sort of
drawing for planning your work and afterwards the value of them is already consumed (i1
in [27] )
The main characteristics of this objective are that the company does not intend
to use the models for further development work and that the modeling activity has
been planned to be only a single iteration. In some cases this situation changes into
one of the other EM objectives discussed in Sects. 2.1 and 2.2. This often happens
because the organization sees EM as beneficial or the problem turns out to be more
complex than initially thought and more effort is need for its solution.
3 EKD - An Example Method
We will use an example method to discuss the requirements on an EM when
applied with a certain intention. The chosen method is the Enterprise Knowledge
Development (EKD) method, which the authors have been involved in develop-
ing, refining and applying since the beginning of the 1990s. This section briefly
introduces its modeling language and main principles.
EKD is a result of a strand of research started in the 1980s by Plandata,
Sweden [ 34] , and later continued by the Swedish Institute for System Development
(SISU). A significant innovation in this strand of EM was the notion of business
goals as part of an Enterprise Model, which allowed analyzing the motivational
perspective of traditional model component types such as entities and business
processes. It was also realized that, considering the multifaceted nature of knowl-
edge that goes into an Enterprise Model, the most efficient way of building such
a model is in close cooperation with domain experts and stakeholders. The SISU
framework was further developed in the ESPRIT projects F3 - “From Fuzzy to
Formal” and ELEKTRA - “Electrical Enterprise Knowledge for Transforming
Applications”. The resulting version of EKD [ 3, 16] can be considered to be
more or less stable because its modeling language and the overall modeling pro-
cess has not been significantly changed. Since the 2001, its authors have mainly
investigated and developed aspects supporting EKD application in practice, e.g.
conducting the modeling process, support for knowledge reuse, and improving
model quality. In the next two sections we will briefly present the modeling lan-
guage and the modeling process as a set of guidelines for a participatory way of
working.