Enterprise Engineering
Enterprise design knowledge is currently descriptive, ad hoc, or pre-scientific.
It is a collection of heuristics which are not applicable in all circumstances.
There is no coherent theory of enterprise design which can explain why
different approaches and techniques work for certain enterprises and why they
fail for other enterprises.
What is needed is a distillation of the principles for
enterprise design implicit within the heuristics, and the formalization of
these principles as logical theories.
This allows a more scientific methodology in which we
test, compare, and validate different enterprise design theories.
These concerns have led to the development of enterprise models.
An enterprise model is a computational representation of the structure,
activities,
processes, information, people, behaviour, goals and constraints of a business,
government or other enterprise. It can be both descriptive and definitional --
spanning what is and what should be.
The role of an enterprise model is to achieve
model-driven enterprise design, analysis, and evaluation.
The formal specification of the semantics of enterprise models
through the use of ontologies provides a
rigorous foundation for enterprise design, analysis, and operations
Furthermore, ontologies support automated deduction for the various
queries that arise from enterprise design and analysis.
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