Exploring Enterprise Information Systems

Abstract

The concept of an Enterprise Information System (EIS) has arisen from the need to deal with the increasingly volatile requirements of modern large-scale organisations. An EIS is a platform capable of supporting and integrating a wide range of activities across an organisation. In principle, the concept is useful and applicable to any large and SMEs, international or national business organisation. However, the range of applications for EIS is growing and they are now being used to support e-government, health care, and non-profit / non-governmental organisations. This chapter reviews research and development efforts related to EIS, and as a result attempts to precisely define the boundaries for the concept of EIS, i.e., identifying what is and what is not an EIS. Based on this domain analysis, a proposal for using goal-oriented modelling techniques for building EIS is constructed; the proposal is made more concrete through illustration via an example.

KAOS-B: A Goal-oriented Process Model for EIS

“…However, contextual information is often needed: for example, it is useful to identify which specific stakeholders have an interest in a goal, and goals may include terms or assumptions that need elaborating or disambiguating. Earlier application of GSN to the stroke-care example [21] had made significant use of the GSN context concept [12], and has thus been incorporated in to the KAOS-β goal documentation. KAOS-β also adds a notes feature, to record goal information that does not fit in any other field, perhaps regarding future consequence or the need to further information.…”

“…Elsewhere, we review current EIS structure and development [21,20]. An enterprise is a collection of small or medium-sized businesses (SMEs) and partners that operates as a single organisation.…”

“…Most EIS are designed and developed for the whole enterprise, rather than for a single business unit or department of the enterprise. They can deal with the problems of a large organisation (which includes different SMEs or partners), and they can deal with the problems of an organisation that includes different departments [21]. This leads to a definition of EIS as a software system that integrates the business processes of organisation(s) to improve their functioning [20, P. 24].…”

“…The challenges of EIS vary across enterprises, with many challenges related to scale and complexity. Some factors that create complexity in EIS are [21]:…”