AN EVALUATION OF ENTERPRISE MODELLING METHODS

IN THE LIGHT OF BUSINESS AND IT ALIGNMENT

Banafsheh Khademhosseinieh and Ulf Seigerroth

School of Engineering, J

onk

oping University P.O. Box 1026, SE-551 11, J

onk

oping, Sweden

Keywords:

Enterprise modelling, IT alignment.

Abstract:

All organisations have to keep improving different aspects of their business in order to survive in their business

area. This improvement can be done in different ways, including as business and IT alignment. There exist

different ways of performing business and IT alignment, such as applying EMMs. Enterprise Modelling (EM)

is an area that has been built up with the intention of improving business practice and management. An

Enterprise Modelling Method (EMM) is a systematic way of building models that are to be used for planning

improvements. For this purpose, it is needed to make an evaluation of methods capabilities in supporting

business and IT alignment. According to all above, the results of this paper include a list of EMMs that are

applicable in business and IT alignment.

1 INTRODUCTION

According to (Harmon, 2010), EM and Business Pro-

cess Management (BPM) are two areas that for a long

time have been part of a tradition where the mission is

to improve business practice and management. In this

tradition the process is usually manifested through the

action of taking a business from one state into an-

other improved state, i.e. a transformation of the en-

terprise into something that is regarded as better. A

challenge that is expressed for BPM is that we need

to move beyond a narrow focus on one tradition or

technology and actually deal with a number of con-

ceptual ways to slice the business in an integrated way

(ibid). Slicing a business (or in a more general form,

an enterprise) means assuming some logical and vir-

tual border-lines between its different parts with the

purpose to ease the analysis. The same argumenta-

tion can be found in the area of EM and Enterprise

Architetcture (EA), where there is a need to conceptu-

ally slice the business but these slices must be treated

as parts in some total alignment context and relate to

each other, as it is stated by (Lankhorst, 2005). In

order to conduct enterprise modelling to produce dif-

ferent models we often seek support in methods to

guide our actions. Methods usually provide a notation

language with rules for representing these conceptual

slices (models) of the enterprise.

As it is expressed by ()WegmannLRW07, it is nec-

essary to apply an IT system that aligns to the business

goals of an organisation. Hence, it is needed that peo-

ple who are involved in this process have solid under-

standing about what the current state of the IT align-

ment is and what the desired state will be. In this

way, using enterprise models can be considered as a

helpful support. In this paper we have the ambition to

make an evaluation of different enterprise modelling

methods in order to shed some light on their ability

to be used as instrumental support for business and IT

alignment. To be able to make this evaluation we will

use a conceptualisation of methods (a method theory)

as a base for classiﬁcation and evaluating each enter-

prise modelling methods. This will then be used as a

foundation to discuss and to draw conclusions about

these methods in terms of their potential in the area of

business and IT alignment.

According to all above, we have deﬁned our re-

search questions:

RQ 1. How does application of EMM support busi-

ness and IT alignment?

RQ 2. What aspects need to be covered by EMM to

cope with business and IT alignment?

RQ 3. What roles should be involved in business and

IT alignment with the help of EMM?

The remainder of this paper will proceed as fol-

lows: In section 2 we discuss the Related Research;

this consists of The Notion of Method (2.1), Business

and IT Alignment (2.2). In section 3 the applied Re-

search Method is described. This explanation is given

by how The Selection of Papers (3.1) and Use of the

479

Khademhosseinieh B. and Seigerroth U..

AN EVALUATION OF ENTERPRISE MODELLING METHODS IN THE LIGHT OF BUSINESS AND IT ALIGNMENT.

DOI: 10.5220/0003494704790484

In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS-2011), pages 479-484

ISBN: 978-989-8425-56-0

 2011 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)

Notion Method (3.2) were performed. Section 4 con-

tains the Results & Discussion that are gained by con-

ducting this work. The results are on Enterprise Mod-

elling Methods (4.1) and Enterprise Modelling Meth-

ods in Business and IT Alignment (4.2).. Section 5,

which is the last section in this paper is Conclusions &

Future Work. This will be divided into three subsec-

tions, which are Conclusions about Application of En-

terprise Modelling Methods in Business and IT Align-

ment (5.1), Discussion of Research Questions (5.2)

and Future Work (5.3).

2 RELATED RESEARCH

In this section we present a method theory (The No-

tion of Method) as well as a theoretical foundation for

business and IT alignment.

2.1 The Notion of Method

The Notion of Method that is used in this work has

been adopted from (Lind et al., 1998). “A method

is prescriptive in character since it gives us guidance

on what to do in different situations in order to reach

certain goals” ()LundqvistHS09. During modelling

there is usually a need to document different aspects

and many modelling methods therefore include roles

for representation, which is often called modelling

techniques or Notations. Such methods also provide

procedural guidelines (Procedures), which are many

times tightly coupled to Notation. The Procedure in-

volves some meta-concepts as process, activity, infor-

mation, and object. They are also parts of the seman-

tics of the Notation. The Concepts are the cement and

the overlapping parts between Procedure and Nota-

tion. Methods can thus be crystallised into: Perform

action A, in order to reach goal G.

It has now been stated that Procedure, Notation

and Concepts, among other things, constitute methods

(ibid). When there is a close link between Procedure,

Notation, and Concepts, it is referred to as a Method

Component (R

ostlinger and Goldkuhl, 1996). (Avi-

son and Fitzgerald, 2006) have shown that a method is

often a compound of several Method Components to

what many times is called a Methodology, as it is cited

in (Lind et al., 1998). These different Method Com-

ponents together form a structure called a Framework,

which includes the phase structure of the method. All

methods build on some implicit (tacit) or explicit Per-

spective. Such a Perspective includes values, princi-

ples and categories (with deﬁnitions), which are more

fully expressed in the method and its Method Compo-

nents. The Perspective is the conceptual and value ba-

sis of the method and its rationality (Lundqvist et al.,

2009). In other words, Perspective speciﬁes the view-

points that should be taken while developing the con-

ceptual slices (models).

As it is stated in (ibid), another aspect of methods

is labelled as Co-operation Principles; i.e. how differ-

ent persons interact and co-operate when performing

method guided work. Co-operation Principles have

to do with roles and division of work in the process.

This aspect is labelled Collection Principles and it is

conceptually important to distinguish between a Pro-

cedure (What questions to ask?), Co-operation Prin-

ciples (Who puts/collects questions?) and Collec-

tion Principles (How to collect answers?). A Method

Component (with procedures) can be used within sev-

eral different Co-operation Principles forms, as e.g.

seminars, brainstorm sessions as againts interviews.

2.2 Business and IT Alignment

An organisation needs to take advantages from re-

sources in order to accomplish its duties. “The

key question is whether an enterprise’s investment

in IT is in harmony with its strategic objectives (in-

tent, current strategy and enterprise goals) and thus

building the capabilities necessary to deliver busi-

ness value. This state of harmony is referred to

as alignment” (Board Brieﬁng on IT Governance:

http://www.isaca.org). Carrying out business and IT

alignment helps the stakeholders to ensure that the ap-

plied IT structure supports the organisation in achiev-

ing its goals, i.e. business and IT alignments has been

provided. An EMM helps in building up models that

show the current (AS-IS) and future (TO-BE) status

of an enterprise. These models will be used in dif-

ferent analysis procedures such as business and IT

alignment in an organisation. In fact an EMM can

be used to illustrate the relations between the organi-

sation and the IT structures. The strategic alignment

model that is used in this paper is the one that devel-

oped by (Henderson and Venkatraman, 1993). Based

on this alignment model, Business determines Organ-

isational Infrastructure & Processes that have to be

set up in an organisation. This speciﬁes the suitable

IS Infrastructure & Processes that should be selected.

Selection of Architecture in IS is a part of decision

about the IS Infrastructure & Processes. Therefore,

depending on the selected IT and Business Strategies

as well as Organisational Infrastructure & Processes,

the Architecture of IS varies.

Organisational Infrastructure & Processes and IS

Infrastructures & Processes need to establish their

strategies, respectively called IT Strategy and Busi-

ness Strategy. These two are needed in order to steer

ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

480

the procedure of reaching the business goals. From

the other side, strategic alignment should exist be-

tween Business and Information Technology. In fact,

business determines what kind of Information Tech-

nology should be applied; the selected Information

Technology should support gaining the business goals

of the organisation. Although creating alignment

between Organisational Infrastructure & Processes,

Business Strategy, IS Infrastructure & Processes and

IT Strategy gives assurance that the business will be

running smoothly, it might result in some restrictions.

3 RESEARCH METHOD

In this section we present how we have selected

the papers that describe methods for enterprise mod-

elling. Moreover, it will be shown how we have made

the classiﬁcation of the enterprise modelling methods

based on the earlier presented method theory.

3.1 Selection of Papers

The papers that have been used for this work were

retrieved by going through different series of confer-

ence proceedings. At this step of the work the aim was

ﬁnding references that were dealing with EMMs and

frameworks. Therefore, we carried out the work by

checking the acknowledged conferences in this ﬁeld,

as well as other well-known conferences in the ﬁeld

of information systems that cover different research

areas. The list of reviewed conferences are listed as

below:

• Practices of Enterprise Modelling (PoEM) 2008-

2010

• Exploring Modelling Methods for Systems Anal-

ysis and Design (EMMSAD) 2000-2010

• International Conference on Information Systems

(ICIS) 2000-2010

• European Conference on Information Systems

(ECIS) 2000-2010

• International Conference on Enterprise Informa-

tion Systems (ICEIS) 2004-2009

• International Conference on Advanced informa-

tion Systems (CAiSE) 2000-2010

Besides working with the above mentioned con-

ference proceedings, some papers, e.g. (Wang et al.,

2009) and (Frank, 2002), were retrieved from other

sources, such as journals or conferences that focus on

a wide range of ﬁelds.

The selection of papers was done by following a

straight-forward but useful strategy: as the ﬁrst step,

we went through the key words and looked for the

terms Modelling and Enterprise Modelling. In case

each of these terms (preferably Enterprise Modelling)

existed in keywords, we proceeded to see if the term

Method was also presented or not. Usually when both

of these terms existed in the keywords, it was a sign

that was showing the paper presents a method. As

the second step, we read the abstract and summary

for each paper. By taking both of these two sections

into account, we could decide if the paper has dis-

cussed a method or some kind of approach for enter-

prise modelling. But this is not enough for recognis-

ing a method. Some authors do not differentiate be-

tween concepts such as method and an approach and

use these terms instead of each other. Therefore, as

the next step we had to go through the main body of

each paper to see what was really being presented and

discussed. This step was done mainly by checking the

headings & sub-headings, ﬁgures and tables. In fact,

in this step a manual data mining method was used.

This resulted in ﬁnding the sections that are more

relevant to this work and had to be reviewed. Then the

mentioned sections were read. Reading these sections

together with assessment of the ﬁgures and tables was

the last step of this stage.

3.2 Use of the Notion of Method

Going through papers that come from different

sources provided us with sources for this study. Then,

it was needed to perform some kind of ﬁltering in or-

der to check if the selected papers will match our pur-

pose. All works were reconstructed, positioned, and

described according to The Notion of Method. Then

this was used to evaluate if the selected papers pre-

sented a method or some other prescriptive instruc-

tions. In order to answer this question, we have ap-

plied the conceptual structure in the method notion

that was presented in section 2.1 and classiﬁed the pa-

pers based on The Notion of Method. This means that

the descriptions of the method or approach for enter-

prise modelling in the paper were assessed based on

the presented Notion of Method. The most important

part of The Notion of Method that had to be covered

(to conclude that the paper is presenting a method)

was Method Component.

4 RESULTS & DISCUSSION

In this section we will discuss which EMMs can serve

as a support for the purpose of business and IT align-

ment.

AN EVALUATION OF ENTERPRISE MODELLING METHODS IN THE LIGHT OF BUSINESS AND IT

ALIGNMENT

481

Table 1: Enterprise Modelling Methods for Business and IT Alignment.

Method or Framework

Name

Perspective

Pr N C MC F CCP

ARCHIMATE

(http://archimate.org/ )

Describing EA

FC PC FC PC FC NC

ZACHMAN (Sowa and

Zachman, 1992)

Deﬁning a 3-layer EA

FC PC FC PC PC NC

i*(Yu, 1995) Early phase requirements engineering

FC FC FC FC PC NC

EKD (Bubenko et al.,

2001)

Modelling the current situation of the

enterprise, the change requirements and the

possible alternatives

FC FC FC FC FC FC

MEMO(Frank, 2002)

Modelling organisational memory/ corporate

knowledgebase

FC FC FC FC NC NC

RESCUE (Jones and

Maiden, 2005)

Modelling and analysing stakeholder’s

requirements (Requirements engineering)

FC FC FC FC PC NC

B-SCP (Bleistein et al.,

2006)

Requirements engineering and organisational

IT alignment

FC FC FC FC FC NC

SEAM (Wegmann et al.,

2007)

Modelling the relevant features of the

organisation and its environment

FC FC FC FC FC NC

PRiM (Grau et al., 2008)

Business process reengineering practice with

the purpose of IS development

FC FC FC FC PC NC

4.1 Enterprise Modelling in Business

and IT Alignment

Enterprise modelling is not just about drawing mod-

els in terms of representations and then leaving them.

These models should rather be the basis for practi-

cal use in other areas. In order to see if an EMM

is applicable in another ﬁeld, it should be investi-

gated whether the method is able to fulﬁl the aims

of that certain ﬁeld. When it comes to business and

IT alignment, it is needed to explore whether the per-

spective of the method matches the objective of busi-

ness and IT alignment. According to (McKeen and

Smith, 2003), strategic alignment of IT exists when a

business organisations goals and activities are in har-

mony with the information systems that support them.

In other words, any for any organisation, IT require-

ments should be in alignment with its business strat-

egy (Bleistein et al., 2006). This alignment can be be-

tween the IT system and the business use cases or be-

tween the IT system and structure of the system. Con-

sequently, methods with Perspectives of modelling an

enterprise together with its linkage to the environment

(including its IT system) and methods that are devel-

oped to be used for requirements engineering are suit-

able for this purpose. Regarding the latter, the EMM

should not be built up for purposes that do not em-

brace IT system requirements.

As mentioned in section 2.1, a modelling method

might cover several aspects of an enterprise. There-

fore we needed to ﬁnd out what aspects of The Notion

of Method that have been covered by each method.

The result of this assessment were later on used in the

next step which was evaluating the EMMs potential

in the ﬁeld of business and IT alignment. The result

of this assessment has been shown in Table 1. Us-

ing this table, the user has the possibility to pick up

an EMM that is applicale for the purpose of business

and IT alignment. Even if he/she has needs to work

with a method that covers one or more aspects of the

the Notion of Method, this table can support this pur-

pose. This table consists of two main sections. The

ﬁrst section shows the name of each method or frame-

work (if any name has been given) in the ﬁrst column

(Method or Framework Name) and the Perspective of

the method as the second column. The Perspective

of each method is deﬁned with respect to its area of

usage and shows in which cases the method can be ap-

plied. The second section is called Coverage. It shows

if different aspectsof The Notion of Method (Pr (Pro-

cedure), N (Notation), C (Concepts), MC (Method

Components), F (Framework) and CCP (Cooperation

& Collection Principles)) are Fully Covered (FC),

Partially Covered (PC) or Not Covered (NC).

5 CONCLUSIONS & FUTURE

WORK

In this section the results that have been achieved dur-

ing the work are presented. The results are presented

in the form of a list. This list contains a number of

conclusions about application of enterprise modelling

methods for the aim of business and IT alignment.

ICEIS 2011 - 13th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

482

5.1 Conclusions about Application of

Enterprise Modelling Methods in

Business and IT Alignment

Below you can ﬁnd a list of conclusions business and

IT alignment and EMMs that are suitable for business

and IT alignment:

1. Fulﬁlling business and IT alignment means pro-

viding harmony between Business Strategy, Or-

ganisational Infrasructure & Processes, IT Strat-

egy and IS Infrastructure & Processes in parallel

with their sub-dimensions.

2. To check if an EMM is usable in business and IT

alignment, it should be checked if it can support

modelling an enterprise, its business and IT sys-

tem. Too, it should serve elaborating the relation

between the enterprise business and its IT system.

5.2 Discussion of Research Questions

Checking different sources that represent EMMs and

frameworks and then reviewing their potencies in

case of application in business and IT alignment,

we put the following discussions as the answers of

research questions:

RQ 1. How does application of EMM sup-

port business and IT alignment?

As mentioned before, the intention of EM ﬁled is

making improvements in enterprises. In this way

EMMs help in illustrating the current and future

state of an enterprise. This illustration will be useful

in planning improvements in different aspects of

the enterprise, including IT system. An enterprise

needs to have an IT system that is in accordance

to its business. Checking alignment of IT is vital

for guaranteeing that IT system will support the

business of the enterprise. A part of this guarantee

is keeping the IT system up to the new situation of

the enterprise. Using EMMs helps in showing the

situation of alignment between the enterprise and its

IT system and how it should be in the future state.

This is done by drawing the current and future state

models, respectively. Then based on the developed

models, it can be decided what type of IT system

will be useful in the future state. Moreover, it can be

determined how to perform changes to move from

the current IT system to the desired one. Therefore, it

can be said that EMMs are applicable in performing

business and IT alignment.

RQ 2. What aspects need to be covered by

EMM to cope with business and IT alignment?

For checking alignment between two sections, it

is important to know what part of each should be

included in the alignment. When it comes to business

and IT alignment, one side of alignment is the IT

system. On the other side, there is an enterprise.

While checking and planning alignment, it is possible

to include two aspects of the enterprise in this

process. One aspect is the set of business processes

of the enterprise and the other one is the environment

& structure of the enterprise. As business and IT

alignment is more about checking if an IS ﬁts to the

business of an enterprise, synchronisation between

the IT system and the business of the enterprise

should be investigated and conﬁrmed.

RQ 3. What roles should be involved in

business and IT alignment with the help of EMM?

For conducting modelling sessions, it is needed

to involve people who ask questions and people

who answer them. People who ask questions are

usually modelling experts and people who answer

the questions are the ones who are ﬁeld experts.

Consequently, when modelling is being done in order

to provide business and IT alignment, IT experts will

be the ones who answer the questions

5.3 Future Work

After achieving the above mentioned results, the next

step will be performing case studies. This will help in

checking to what extent the presented list of EMMs

support business and IT alignment.

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