Separation of modeling principles and design principles in enterprise engineering

Abstract

An agile enterprise requires evolvable information systems and organizational structures. Some design theories, e.g. Normalized Systems theory, which were originally developed for designing information systems, have been generalized and extended for the design of organizations. In addition to information systems, Normalized Systems theory has recently expanded its applicability into the organizational level, including business process. This resulted in a set of 25 design guidelines for Normalized Systems Business Processes. On the other hand, Enterprise Ontology provides advantages in understanding the essence of organizations for massive abstraction and complexity reduction. Since these two streams of research apparently have similar goals, i.e. designing enterprises, using different approaches, some early studies tried to compare or combine them. However, most of them achieved limited success. This research investigates the literature, looking for a new way to connect them. It concludes that it may be possible to sequentially utilize those two artifacts in two different phases of enterprise engineering.