An Intentional Perspective on Enterprise Modeling - Intentional Perspectives on Information Systems Engineering - page 225

Design/re-design the business. This objective requires a modeling language
and notation that all stakeholders understand, is formal enough to represent the
knowledge clearly and unambiguously, as well as is established and known within
the organization.
Develop IS. This objective requires using a modeling language that supports clear
and unambiguous expression of facts. Furthermore the language chosen should have
a meta-model that allows integration with other model types used in IS engineering,
such as, for instance, use cases. For modeling business concepts the project might
chose to use class diagrams and gradually refine the concepts model into a domain
model which can be used in the later stages of the IS development.
Ensure acceptance for business decisions. Similarly to developing the company
vision and strategy in this case the modeling language should be understandable by
all stakeholders. Since in this case the key focus is on the business decisions, these
should be made clearly identifiable in the models. For this purpose the modelers
might use additional modeling components such as, for instance, actions. The main
purpose of them is to serve as visible reminders about the joint decisions and who
should do what in order to implement them.
Maintain and share knowledge about the business. The modeling language cho-
sen should be relatively commonly used, widely accepted by the intended target
audience, and since company-wide training in modeling languages is difficult to
achieve, intuitive. For instance, in this case models should be expressed by com-
monly seen languages and notations supported by textual descriptions. Potential
misunderstandings of the graphical symbols should also be assessed, e.g. people
might easily perceive ellipses as UML use cases or arrows with large arrowheads as
UML generalizations.
Use EM as a problem solving tool. The modeling language should fit the nature
of the problem - e.g. if the problem concerns an overall identification and analysis
of a problem the main requirements for the modeling language are understandability
and possibility to use it without extensive training. On the other hand, in some cases
the nature of the problem may require a formal modeling language that is able to
represent knowledge more strictly.
5.4 EM Process Requirements
It is equally important to select and prepare the right process of modeling to
suit different modeling purposes that it is to select the right modeling language.
This perspective on modeling has largely been overshadowed by the language
perspective, even if the outcome of modeling can never be better than the pro-
cess that was applied to develop the models. In this chapter we focus on the
participation aspect of the process because our research clearly shows that not
only the culture of the organization determines whether or not a participatory
approach is appropriate. We have also found that different purposes of modeling
also influence the choice of approach to participation. More about this is available
in [20, 22, 30] .