A key aim in much of our lives in a material world is to be able to reuse things.
In IT the reuse of technology (e.g. methods and techniques) and the resulting technological applications (e.g. models or software) can save time and money. Experience shows that designing software to be reused takes significantly more effort than designing one-off software, even if the latter is extremely well designed. Therefore, principles for achieving reuse are continuously being sought. Of course, one always has to determine whether the potential for reuse justifies the extra effort.
There is scope for reaping considerable benefits from reuse in enterprise modelling. As mentioned in Enterprise Models for Enactment, an enterprise model may serve a variety of purposes, such as forming a basis for process re-engineering, establishing the requirements for IT systems or even for specifying enactment systems.
A key potential way of achieving reuse in enterprise modelling is through ontologies. At the First International Conference on Enterprise Integration Modelling Technologies (ICEIMT) [1], Working Group 3 reported the following relationship between business modelling and ontologies:
"The Business Modelling Process is one of modelling the business for enterprise integration purposes; the output and products of the process are generic ontologies, business domain ontologies and business models. The Business Modelling Process includes both the making of ontologies and models and integrating the models for enterprise integration purposes.''