From Strategic to Conceptual Enterprise Information Requirements - A Mapping Tool

Enterprise Information analysis can be modeled on three levels: Logical, Conceptual and Strategic. Logical level is used daily on thousand of projects to design databases. Conceptual level is used by analysts to structure detailed information needs expressed by users. Strategic level is used by IT and user management to define Enterprise Information Architecture and/or to assess the viability of the current information assets. While mapping conceptual onto logical modeling is well-established, strategic and conceptual levels are poorly linked. This drawback very often prevents enterprise to implement a sound information strategy. We here present a method that maps strategic enterprise information into conceptual information modeling. For strategic modeling a comprehensive framework is used that enables to readily identify information domains of a wide range of enterprises. Mapping strategic to conceptual models is performed by a set of simple and predefined rules. The paper also illustrates the tool that has been developed to assist the whole design and mapping process. Finally a case study on materials handling exemplifies our approach. 1 INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS LEVELS It is a common practice to classify enterprise information requirements in two abstraction levels, logical and conceptual. The former is represented by Relational models (Elmasri, 2004) and the latter by Entity Relationship (ER). Of course, over years other modeling techniques have been developed. For instance Dimensional Fact Model (Golfarelli, 1998) focuses at the conceptual level. Other modeling technique families as Unified Modeling Language (Object Management Group, 2005) cross levels. Each abstraction level is for a certain community of users. Typically the conceptual level is for analysts and logical one is for Database Administrators (DBA) or generally for implementation engineers. However, ER is too detailed for an overview of an even limited domain. Actually an ER schema of the customer/order domain in an enterprise may count hundreds of entities! Therefore, above the conceptual level, a third abstraction level is needed. This third level shall address enterprise information as a whole and also target the strategic needs that are of key interest for management. In short it shall be the backbone of IT strategy and planning. The positions of the three abstraction levels are represented by Figure 1. Figure 1: Abstraction levels of enterprise Information. In short, the strategic level should represent information in a very aggregated and compact form that can be understood by IT and user management and can be used in IT strategic planning. The strategic level issue is in Enterprise Information Architecture (Josey, 2009) and in Enterprise Information Integration (EII). The latter has the 440 Motta G. and Pignatelli G. (2010). FROM STRATEGIC TO CONCEPTUAL ENTERPRISE INFORMATION REQUIREMENTS A Mapping Tool. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems Information Systems Analysis and Specification, pages