Framework for Establishing Enterprise Modeling in the Context of Collaborative Enterprises

Increased market dynamics, shorter product lifecycles and a higher customer involvement in product design have caused great changes to competitive conditions and many companies are confronted with the challenge of becoming interoperable. Becoming interoperable tackles a lot of areas within an enterprise (e.g. organizational structures, processes etc.) and the problem for most enterprises consist in identifying their weaknesses and strengths concerning their interoperability capabilities. Enterprise models have the goal to reduce complexity and give a representation of structures, activities, processes, information, resources, people and behavior of an enterprise and the dependencies between them. Especially for enterprise collaborations, models help to understand each other, to plan, implement and to support interactions. But most companies are not ready yet to harvest the benefits of enterprise modeling and fail in establishing model based collaborations. In the frame of enterprise integration and user oriented enterprise modeling this paper introduces an approach that supports enterprise stakeholders to implement enterprise modeling within collaborative companies. One objective is to present an approach that enables companies to get the most effect out of enterprise modeling in a collaborative environment based on the maturity of their organization relative to modeling. Further on, an enterprise modeling based establishment methodology can be presented which enables companies to understand and manage their current enterprise interoperability maturity. The methodology can describe discrete levels of interoperability improvement based on the successive adoption of good enterprise modeling practices in the different enterprise dimensions