Model Based System Development/Research Themes/Enterprise Engineering

Enterprise engineering

Enterprise Engineering (EE) is an emerging discipline which aims to deal with the challenges (agility, adaptability, etc.) and the opportunities (new markets, new technologies, etc.) faced by contemporary enterprises, including commercial, nonprofit and governmental institutions. The field is based on the paradigm that such enterprises are purposefully designed systems, and thus they can be redesigned in a systematic and controlled way. Enterprise engineering projects typically involve architecture, design, and implementation aspects. Indicative of the growing maturity of the young field of EE, Springer Verlag has recently initiated a book series dedicated to this theme. To us, the domain of EE is an an interesting and fertile context in which to study and evaluate our fundamental research on conceptual modelling.

The mission of the discipline of Enterprise Engineering is to combine (relevant parts from) the organizational sciences and the information systems sciences, and to develop theories and methodologies for the analysis, design, and implementation of future enterprises. Two crucial concepts have emerged that are considered paramount for accomplishing this mission: Enterprise Ontology and Enterprise Architecture. A precondition for incorporating these methodologies effectively in an enterprise is a well established practice of Enterprise Governance.

Research strategy

At the strategic level, we currently follow a dual approach: establish an academic discipline and nurture the relationship with industry.

Practical relevance of our theoretical results is important to us. Therefore, we commit to the Design Science approach. Striving for the use of quantitative methods where possible, we often do deploy qualitative methods, in particular in explorative phases of our research. Case studies and experiments are our chief means of gathering empirical data.

Practical relevance of our research may be our main reason for getting close to industry, but admittedly we also seek interaction with industry to create more leverage towards obtaining funding. Current enterprise engineering practice provides numerous challenges that are heartfelt in practice. By using these challenges to prioritize our research agenda, we are able to create an intimate and sustainable relationship with industry. In other words, while we have a fundamental interest in conceptual modeling applied in the field of enterprise engineering, we use an impact-driven approach to set our research agenda. The intimate relationship with industry serves as a base for funded projects: large ones (like ArchiMate), but also smaller projects such as individual PhD projects.

Key in building the relationship with industry are our adjunct professors, but also our participation in the Netherlands Architecture Forum (NAF), an organisation bringing together client organizations, consultancy firms and universities. Our group was one of the co-initiators of NAF, and has been one of the most active academic participants since it started.

Industrial impact

We already mentioned the co-initiation of the Netherlands Architecture Forum, which is a key national (Dutch) instrument for enabling practical impact. Internationally, however, our biggest impact so far has been achieved by means of the AchiMate Project.

At the turn of the century, the most commonly used modelling approach for enterprise engineering (and enterprise architecture) was "PowerPoint". In other words, informal sketches in a free-format drawing tool. The dissatisfaction with this situation, combined with the inability to provide analysis of the models, sparked the ArchiMate project in which our group actively participated. The project involved a broad consortium: Ordina, Belastingdienst, Telematica Instituut, ABP, ABN-Amro, Leiden University, CWI and Radboud University. The ArchiMate project was an accelerator for much of our work on conceptual modelling. Many of the results of this project have found their way to industry. Most importantly is the ArchiMate language, which has now been accepted by The Open Group as their preferred language for architectural descriptions to be used in conjunction with their TOGAF architecture method. Currently, ArchiMate is in use by over 200 organisations. This includes:

1. Client organisations such as ING Bank, Belastingdienst, KLM-Air France Cargo, Koninklijke Boskalis and Corus.
2. Teaching programs at Universities, such as Radboud Unversity Nijmegen, Leiden University, Staffordshire University, King's College London, and City University of Hong Kong.
3. Consultancy firms, such as Logica, Atos-Origin, Capgemini, Ordina and Sogeti.
4. Tool suppliers, such as Troux, IBM - Telelogic, IDS Scheer, Casewise and BiZZdesign.

(This list is far from exhaustive)

Another aspect of enterprises is regulation of business behaviour and transformation processes. The former results in so called business rules aimed at restricting/regulating the operational behaviour of business processes. Within this field, our group has been able to leverage past theoretical results (PhD Stijn, Lisa-D) and transfer some of these insights into the practical domain, for example by contributions to the NAF working group on Business Rules, as well as advisory roles towards Everest, an innovative builder of a business rules engine, and LIBrT, a leading company in Business Rules Management affiliated to the internationally renowned Business Rule Solutions (Ron Ross, USA). With regards to the restricting/guiding operational behaviour through architecture, the theoretical insights from our group have found their way into numerous publications and presentations of NAF.

Another important aspect of enterprise engineering is the restriction of design space, in other words EE provides regulations which enable key decision makers to govern the transformation of (their) enterprise. The transfer of these insights have led to Erik Proper's membership of the advisory board of Ordina's GEA project, as well as the part-time PhD project of Roel Wagter, a leading architect at Ordina. In addition, Mark Paauwe (Paauwe & Partners) is doing a part-time PhD project on a related topic. Furthermore, we provided extensive input on xAF (Extendable Architecture Framework) workgroup, which produced a NAF-ponsored book, and initiated and still chair the NAF Principles workgroup, now also working towards a book.

As a result of the increased usage and acceptance of modelling languages and frameworks such as ArchiMate, BPMN, and SBVR in industrial practice, there is now a growing awareness in industry that models in such well-defined languages indeed allow for richer analysis, simulation and/or execution, thus enabling increased returns on modelling efforts. We consider this a step ahead in terms of execution of our research strategy. It also puts on our industry-driven research agenda the topic of simulation and analysis based on architecture models and principles. We will actively seek to expand our research activities in this direction.

Academic impact

A member of our group has been chair or co-chair of EMMSAD since 2005 (Exploring Modelling Methods for System Analysis and Design); this workshop, which is officially supported by IFIP workgroup 8.1 (of which several people in the TEE group are members) is a key event among academics in the fields of conceptual modelling and method engineering. EMMSAD is structurally affiliated to the CAiSE conferences, which in Europe are a key event for Information Systems in its broadest sense. Rooted in the EMMSAD community, two further events have been set up recently, closely involving various TEE members. First, 2008 saw the first IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on the Practice of Enterprise Modelling (PoEM, Stockholm). We initiated and chaired a more industry-oriented Working Conference, PRET 2009: "Practice-Driven Research on Enterprise Transformation". We initiated and co-chaired a further workshop at CAiSE 2008, on Regulations Modelling and Deployment (ReMoD 2008), and chair the 4th SIKS conference on Enterprise Information Systems (EIS 2009, Nijmegen).

The new practice-oriented community in Enterprise Engineering now regularly publishes its proceedings under "Advances in Enterprise Engineering", a sub-series of the Lecture Notes on Business Information Processing (Springer). To establish and further develop the discipline of Enterprise Engineering, Springer also established a new book series on Enterprise Engineering, of which the TEE group leader is joint Editor-in-Chief. Books in this series are aimed at academic students and advanced professionals, while their content ranges from theoretical foundations to application experiences. One TEE member is on the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Information System Modeling and Design (IJISMD), a new journal by IGI Global (USA); another is on the review board.

Publications

Based on the four research themes in conceptual modelling, we have produced the following contributions to the field of enterprise engineering.

Quality of modelling

• Architecture Principles (ORM paper over principles)
• ORM past: Rigourous modelling!!
• ORM, BPMN and SD: Multi-perspective modelling drives domain quality.

Return on modelling effort

• Architecture Principles, Business Rules and Regulations (EMISA paper, plus ...??)
• Model transformation papers by Patrick!!!!

Act of modelling

• Josephine's work
• Denis' work
• Older stuff

Reference models as theory

• Sietse
• Bas
• Paul