Toward a more Versatile and Productive Use of Enterprise Models: Prospects of “Power Modelling”

by Ulrich Frank – Chair of Information Systems and Enterprise Modelling at the University of Duisburg-Essen

Brief bio: Ulrich Frank holds the chair of Information Systems and Enterprise Modelling at the Institute of Computer Science and Business Information Systems at the University of Duisburg-Essen. His main research topic is enterprise modelling, i.e. the development and evaluation of modelling languages, methods and corresponding tools. Further areas of research include method engineering, models at run time, methods for IT management and research methods. Ulrich Frank is Editor in Chief of the Journal Enterprise Modelling and Information Systems Architectures and associate Editor of the Journals Business & Information Systems Engineering, Software and Systems Modeling and Information Systems and E-Business Management. He has been actively involved in numerous conferences and various major research projects. He had assignments as visiting researcher/professor in various countries. Ulrich Frank is the founding director of the international student exchange network IS:link.

Abstract: The prospects of enterprise modelling are widely undisputed. Nevertheless the current practice of enterprise modelling remains unsatisfactory. The creation of enterprise models is restricted to early phases of system lifecycle. Hence, the benefits of models in later phases are ignored. While domain-specific modelling languages (DSML) promise a major shift with respect to usability and productivity, the creation of comprehensive enterprise models still requires skills and resources that go beyond many companies’ capabilities. In this talk, the outline of a new modelling paradigm, referred to as power modelling, is presented. It builds on the potential of multi-level DSML, application frameworks and reference models. It regards enterprise models as the primary medium to perceive, interact with and change enterprise software systems – and the environment they are supposed to operate in during the entire system lifecycle. While it builds on DSML, power modelling represents a paradigm shift in the sense that it proposes a new perspective on creating and using enterprise models. It also aims at overcoming the notorious problem of synchronizing models and code.

Engineering Enterprises for the New Economy: Whitening the Black Boxes for Survival

by Jorge Sanz – Director, Business Analytics Center – National University of Singapore; Chief Innovation Officer Retail Banking – IBM Corporation

Brief bio: Jorge Sanz has spent over 20 years doing foundational research and practical work in business transformation, information sciences and communication technologies. He has a PhD in applied mathematics and computer science, and specializes in analytical modeling for companies, business processes and organizational performance. He has worked for several years in telecommunications, health care and banking industries. He was Full Professor in the United States and President of a business and economics school. Before this work, he has also conducted extensive research on high-speed signal and real-time video processing and analysis and parallel computing. Jorge conducts research on enterprise engineering, componentized business architecture and the role of information technology as a transformational instrument in line-of-businesses. Today, he works for IBM Research and does work on the liaisons between business processes and information, as well as deep analytics for business performance modeling and prediction. He actively consults for European, American and Chinese companies. He leads professional activities in international communities of business, informatics, service engineering. He has chaired several conferences on the interplay of business and IT, both from an architecture and a practice view. Jorge has more than 120 published papers and several books. He is a Fellow of the IEEE Society.

Abstract: An emerging individual-centered economy is driving most significant changes in markets. Indeed, enterprises do not fully dictate consumption as in the past, may not impose channels to their customers any longer, cannot establish value realization instances to exclusively fit their own isolated needs, do not generate loyalty (with customers or employees) through conventional experiences (past satisfaction metrics and measurements do not explain present churn rates) and finally, they are changing traditional transaction-centric view of operations to a much different one in which interaction and collaboration are essential. This is particularly notorious in the way companies prepare themselves to deal with customers: much of the operational needs and investments focus on enterprise-customer touch-points and journeys whose essence is not transactional and whose evolution mechanisms do not follow pre-established paths or strict contracts between involved roles. Also, the activities that an enterprise undertakes to realize monetization have a much different time-span and richer context than those involved in the moment of transacting. Furthermore, while the notion of value may still be experiential, it is also essential for a firm as a large fraction of a market may reach the same subjective evaluation very quickly and thus, downturn business performance mercilessly.

Consequently, there is an ongoing transformation from organizations designed and managed around a transactional view of dealing with customers to another type in which designing and managing are driven by a much more complex form of involving the customer individually. For example, in the new economic regime, customers do not longer tolerate being the resolution point of enterprise disconnections of all sorts, including the currently broken multi-channel customer management and other troubled experiences that lead to the known loss of loyalty. All in all, collaborative and interactional enterprises are already emerging in this new economy. And there will be more profound changes ahead in the way firms interact with each other, how deconstruction of traditional supply chains takes place, how new ecosystems are developed, what new sources of competition arise and how collaborative design of services and products takes place.

The significance of all the above for Enterprise Engineering is that more foundational work is needed. In retrospective, the Enterprise Engineering Principles published in 2013 could not have been more timely. It is critical to revisit these solid principles to understand how they are being closely followed when made into a theory of organizations and how to execute them in practice for delivering change assessments suited to the reality of the emerging economy. Summarizing with some figurative language: the devil resides in the black boxes and whitening them is essential. Diving into this reflection, which also implies an inseparable duality between ontological and subjective choices, is a critical activity as Enterprise Engineering is set to capture the emerging characteristics of real-world organizations, to promote their sense-making as dynamic entities made of humans with intentions and moral, to develop methods that equip managers with actionable instruments and finally, to enlighten firm governance roles much more convincingly.