Practical Challenges of Enterprise Modeling in the Light of Business and IT Alignment

Abstract

Abstract. The need to reduce a gap between organizational context and technology within enterprise has been recognized and discussed by both researchers and practitioners. In order to solve this problem it is required to capture and analyze both business and IT dimensions of enterprise operation. In this regard, Enterprise Modeling is currently considered as widely used and powerful tool that enables and facilitates alignment of business with IT. The central role of EM process is EM practitioner -a person who facilitates and drives EM project towards successful achievement of its goals. Conducting EM is a highly collaborative and nontrivial process that requires considerable skills and experience since there are various challenges to manage and to deal with during the whole EM project. Despite quite wide range of related research, the question of EM challenges needs further investigation, in particular concerning the viewpoint of EM practitioners. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to identify challenges that EM practitioners usually face during their modeling efforts taking into consideration potential influence of these challenges on successful conduct of EM and on alignment of Business and IT thereafter.

Enterprise Modeling for Business and IT Alignment – a Framework and Recommendations

“…The results from the first two iterations are presented in [18] and [19], and the final framework is presented in this article. The two key elements that this study relies upon are environment and knowledge base (Figure 1).…”

“…After obtaining and outlining the set of relevant papers, it was possible to analyze the collected data -add logical tags to each paper and then create a set of categories. The results of the systematic literature review are presented in detail in [18].…”

Towards Guiding the Use of Enterprise Modeling in the Context of Business and IT Alignment

“…The Preliminary EM framework has been presented in [14], whereas the Intermediate EM framework -in [15]. This paper aims to focus on the Final EM framework, which in the following will be addressed as the EM framework.…”

The Diversity of Enterprise Modeling – a Taxonomy for Enterprise Modeling Actions

“…In Figure 2 below five different dimensions (the arrows) have been proposed that describe the character of models on different levels and within different levels (cf. [47]). In the background of the figure there is a triangle, which represents an organizational alignment triangle with different levels like strategies, business models in the upper levels and work practices, processes, and IS/IT structures in the lower levels.…”

“…Dimensions of EM and business and IT alignment[47] Degree of formalism refers to different modeling notations, spanning from formal machine interpretable languages to very informal rich pictures, where the expressivity of the selected formalism impacts the final model. The direction of the arrow for this dimension means that the demands on the degree of formalism in the models will increase the closer to implementation of IS/IT structures one gets.…”