Integration of Enterprise Modeling and Ontology Engineering as Support for Business/IT-Alignment

Abstract

To create viable digital products from business and technical perspective, stakeholders from different enterprise functions should be involved. The focus of the paper is on the use of modelling approaches, in particular ontologies and enterprise models, for specifying the requirements to new services or products. There are hardly any reports of ontology usage in business and IT-alignment efforts, although ontologies can be used to capture the shared understanding of important concepts between business and IT stakeholders. The paper aims to bridge the gap between representations adequate for business stakeholders and ontology representations. The integration of a (business-oriented) enterprise modeling method with an (IT-oriented) ontology construction method is proposed by developing a method component. The main contributions of the paper are (1) a method component integrating enterprise modeling and ontology construction procedures, (2) an application case motivating the method component and showing its usage, and (3) first experiences in using the method component.