Four Enterprise Modeling Perspectives and Impact on Enterprise Information Systems

Abstract

The alignment between Enterprise Modeling (EM) and Software Specification (SS) is still uncertain, this leading to enterprise information systems of low quality. Hence, only the EM-driven software generation could help aligning software functionalities to domain requirements. This inspires the emergence of innovative approaches, such as the SDBC (Software Derived from Business Components) approach, considered by us. It steps on a conceptual invariance (embracing concepts whose essence goes beyond the barriers between social and technical disciplines), while SDBC also builds upon this, to accommodate a modeling duality featuring (1) technology-independent EM rooted in social theories; (2) SS rooted in computing paradigms. The proposed EM-SS alignment is component-based, featuring a potential re-use of modeling constructs, such that the modeling effectiveness and efficiency are stimulated. We consider particularly (1), observing insufficient EM maturity in general: many analysts conduct intuitive EM (not scientifically grounded); they often fail to be exhaustive (some mainly focus on behavior, others – on data, and so on); some analysts mix up essential business things with information exchange that is not featuring essential business things; other analysts are unaware of the importance of communicative acts; many analysts overlook regulations and values; and so on. We address 4 EM perspectives, namely language acts, regulations, public values, and energy – each of them is a theory/paradigm on its own and studying them in isolation is important. It is also important considering them in combination, identifying possibilities for bringing them together, in order to achieve a more exhaustive EM foundation with regard to corresponding SS. We argue that the 4 perspectives make our EM vision usefully broad but we do not claim exhaustiveness. We have studied each of them, providing accordingly theoretical justification and partially demonstrating their practical applicability (by means of an example). Thus, the contribution of our paper is two-fold: (i) We make a small contribution to the development of the SDBC approach; (ii) We analyze different EM perspectives.