Comprehensive Tool Support for Enterprise Modeling and Evaluation

Introduction

Enterprise modelling refers to the development of conceptual models describing a company’s business processes (Nüttgens, 1997), documenting and communicating information systems requirements (Sommerville and Sawyer, 1997), specifying database schemas (Chen, 1976), or capturing the corporate strategy of an enterprise (Frank, 2002). Developing such conceptual models requires a wide variety of different modelling languages (Koschmider, Hornung, and Oberweis, 2011). These languages specify a set of object and relationship types as well as corresponding diagrammatic representations, thus facilitating the development of graphical conceptual models (Draheim et al., 2010).

Enterprise modelling allows for describing various aspects of an organisation on different levels of abstraction (Frank, 2002). The resulting models need to be evaluated in order to identify inefficiencies and derive improvement potential for the real world aspects they describe (Gustas and Gustiené, 2003). Evaluating a conceptual model means analysing its structural and semantic properties as well as determining its fit to a given domain. Evaluating conceptual models cannot solely be based on objective criteria (Frank, 1998). It is rather a subjective process that requires a discussion among modellers and model users. However, enterprise modelling and effective model evaluation presupposes comprehensive tool support for those aspects of the model evaluation process that can be automated (Recker, 2012). Implementing corresponding tools that allow for both enterprise modelling and a rigorous evaluation of models, however, proves challenging for a number of reasons: