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A Working Definition

As with many such terms, enterprise modelling is widely used as a catch-all title to describe the activity of modelling any pertinent aspect of an organisation's structure and operation, in order to improve selected measures of the organisation's performance.

In this broad sense, it encompasses most aspects of classical operations research, process optimisation, human resource allocation, organisational design, business process re-engineering etc. There is nothing new in these activities: organisations have been carrying them out for as long as they have appreciated the need to improve business performance.

So what is new? Why do we now need to define something which is specifically "Enterprise Modelling''?

What is new is that the strength of the drivers for change which an organisation needs to manage, together with the reduced time available to make the changes, is increasing the breadth and the depth of the organisation which is affected by the need to change. That is, there is increasingly a need to focus on enterprises as a whole, or at least on a larger set of interacting components within the organisation -- taking a more "total systems'' approach.

Economic, social and market pressures are such that this is likely to be a continuing state of affairs. At the strategic level, there is a need to manage changes in such areas as rationalisation of manufacturing capacity, extended supply chain management, reduced innovation time, sociological changes and assessment of futures. At the tactical level, there is the need to re-engineer processes, to redefine organisational structures and to ensure tactical operations are in synchronism with strategy. A common element is the need to manage complexity under reducing time spans and conditions of greater uncertainty.

Thus, within this project, we view enterprise modelling as encompassing the activities of enabling:

• capture and description of all relevant aspects of an enterprise (e.g. its processes, strategy, organisational structure, resources, goals, constraints and environment);

• specification of business problems and requirements;

• identification and evaluation of solution options and alternative design and implementation paths at strategic, tactical and operational levels;

• reuse of the models.

The enterprise model is typically characterised by:

• the kinds of enterprise;
• the types of problems;
• the purposes of building the models;
• the contents of the models;
• the forms of representations.

A closely related field to enterprise modelling is "enterprise integration'', which is defined in [1] as "the consistent sharing of information and coherent scheduling of tasks over the set of distributed agents working on a set of interrelated problems within an enterprise.''

This goes further than enterprise modelling, where the focus is more on the consistent sharing of information than on the coherent scheduling of tasks. Consistent sharing of information refers to having semantic and syntactical structures for the information common to all the providers and users of the information.