Enterprise Ontology (EO) is commonly understood as a rather logical and technical notion, dealing with the entities and events in an enterprise that are considered relevant for executing, managing and governing its operations. In the emerging discipline of Enterprise Engineering (EE)1, a richer and more effective notion is applied. EO is now considered as the understanding of the operational essence of an enterprise, based on the social interactions between employees through which they coordinate their work2. EE also provides the proper theoretical foundations to create such an understanding3. By a combination of several techniques for reducing complexity, it is feasible to build a comprehensive, coherent, consistent and yet concise model of this operational essence. EO thus becomes a key instrument to attain intellectual manageability, to offer professionals like business analysts and enterprise architects, as well as managers, the insight and overview they need to address the complexities they face. At the same time, such an essential model of the enterprise contains the core of what is needed to develop effective enterprise information systems, business process management systems, business intelligence systems etc.
In this tutorial, you will be exposed to a fundamentally new way of conceiving the notion of EO and of applying it as a potent instrument in analysing the operations of enterprises and in creating effective ideas for improving them through
redesign or re-engineering or re-implementation. First, you will be introduced to the EE theories that underly the notion of EO, and you will learn how to build ontological models, based on these theories. Then, we will demonstrate the practical value of this new way of building essential enterprise models on the basis of a recent large case study.
Format
This is a 3 hour tutorial consisting of the next two parts:
• Presentation of the EE based notion of EO; building essential models of enterprises (90 minutes)
• The application of EO to two cases: a municipality and a logistics company (90 minutes)
References
1 Dietz, J.L.G., Hoogervorst, J.A.P. et. al: The Discipline of Enterprise Engineering. In: Int. J. Organisational Design and Engineering,
Vol. 3, No. 1, 2013, pp 86-114
2 Dietz, J.L.G.: Enterprise Ontology – Theory and Methodology. Springer, Heidelberg (2006)
3 https://www.researchgate.net/project/Enterprise-Engineering-Theories