Enterprise Modeling Issues - Coursework Example

Enterprise modeling Name Professor Course Date Background An enterprise modeling simply refers to modeling of the various process, assets, groups, infrastructure, or other elements of a business organization. Any computational representation of a company government, or/and nongovernmental organization process, activities structure, resource, information, behavior, goal or constraints, can be referred as an enterprise model. An enterprise model can be either definitional or descriptive. Enterprise model helps the managers to visualize what is happening in an enterprise and how to make necessary adjustments. Early forms of enterprise modeling helped analyst to fix hardware and deal with other sorts of troubleshooting. However, with information technologies infrastructures increasingly becoming complicated, enterprise modeling is becoming more useful For instance, data from research has shown that more young people are becoming entrepreneurs, in 2011, 5% of youth under age of 30 were starting business, the figure increased to 7% in 2012 and further to 9.5 % in 2013. Such information can be represented in a model as shown below. Introduction The main objective of an enterprise model is to analyze and design enterprise operation into models. When we consider a model in term of a design then an enterprise model should provide a language used to define an enterprise explicitly. To evaluate the alternatives designs that are available for an enterprise, there is need to consider different set of constraints facing an enterprise. On the other hand, when considering a model as an operation, then, an enterprise model must be able to represent what has already happened as well as what is planned. It must provide information and knowledge required to support the enterprise’s operations. Most importantly, a model should ask questions that are commonly asked in the performance tasks. This paper highlights some of the challenges that today’s enterprises are facing and a possible way in which enterprise integration and modeling can help to solve them. Challenges facing enterprises The modern business environment is becoming more competitive. Operating in the modern environment is increasingly becoming more challenging for enterprises. Certain market trends are making it difficult for an enterprise to survive. One important observation to make is that while all enterprise is facing some challenges, the challenge varies. This means that, depending on their industries different enterprises are facing different challenges. The implication of this is that no single solution that will solve all the enterprise problems. What managers need is a combination of solution in order to survive (Flores, 2008) As mentioned above, different enterprises are facing different challenges. For instance, social enterprises that normally depend on donations and investment from private sectors and public sectors funding are experiencing a drastic reduction in funding due to the recent financial crises. Those in developing nation where public funding is limited being the highly affected. To survive such enterprises are forced to decrease their social activities. This has resulted in a reduction in employment opportunities. Securing a consistent and constant funding is, therefore, one of the biggest challenges. It is worthwhile noting that lack of enough funding is a challenge not only to social enterprises but also to all other enterprise Another challenge that is facing enterprises is being true to their mission and avoiding social washing. In simple terms, social washing refers to the wrong marketing message that create a perception that a company policy service and products are based on creating a social value while in reality they are not. For instance due to the current campaign against global warming, more enterprises have moved from driving a green agenda to a more comprehensive sustainability agenda that encompasses the environmental, social and governance factors. In today’s world, the role of enterprises in the societies has become an executive suit topic as it has both stakeholders and recruiting appeal. This means that stakeholders are increasingly valuing an association with socially minded enterprises and enterprises that value sociality are gaining popularity as an employer of choice. As a result, there is an advantage for an organization to up their strategies toward social values. However, being socially minded is challenging. It is costly, and to achieve it enterprise needs to restructure their goals and objectives. Globalization of market is another challenge that enterprise are facing. With the recent internationalization of markets, even small-locally oriented enterprise have to view them self in a global context. According to Arnowitz and Berger, (2007), globalization and technological progress enable the business to buy, sell and corporate in global activities. At the same time, opening up of markets provide consumers with an opportunity to compare the products prices globally. Internationalization of market means several things to an enterprise. For instance it mean the expansion of customer base, reduce dependency on few customers and an opportunity to expand. However, it also means increased competition from probably well-established business and difficulties in adapting to new cultures. Going global seems inevitable for most of the enterprise. However, internationalization of business is accompanied by numerous risk and problem. Moreover, going global requires a level of experience and knowledge within an enterprise. This is the reason why the decision to go global call for stronger vision, commitment and determination of all the stakeholders. Despite the numerous challenges that enterprise are facing, they have to remain comparative to survive. For an enterprise to remain successful, they must produce high quality products and services at all time. They must also customized to local markets needs and open such that they may be intergraded with other product and services. In addition, firms need to become environmentally friendly and technically advanced. To achieving the above capability, then a firm must be agile. An agile firm has the ability to continuously monitor markets demands and quickly respond to new trends by providing new products services and information. It also means ability to quickly introducing new technologies, as well as quickly modifying business levels. The challenge is to build and operate an agile enterprise. Dehnert, and Aalst, (2010) state, an agile enterprise is entrepreneur and virtual in nature. In addition, an agile enterprise ensures that people and information are integrated. To achieve agility, a firm needs high level of of coordination and cooperation within and among the enterprise. What this means is that, an agile enterprise is structural, behavior and information integrated. Achieving business integration calls for development of information structure that foster communications of ideas, knowledge and information that is necessary in making decision and coordination of action. The enterprise modeling is at the heart of this infrastructure. Enterprise model current approaches There exist several different approaches to enterprise modeling. Enterprise model ontologies are differentiated by their scope and central roles of integrating multiple ontologies. However, it is important that the ontology is able to represent in the domain of activity, time resource, product and service organization, goal and policy. An example of an enterprise model is ICAM. This is an integrated computer aided manufacturing, which was developed in 80s by united state air force. Other models include Toronto virtual enterprise ontology and process interchange format. To fully achieve enterprise integration, it is important to evaluate whether enterprise model are suited for the task. Six characteristics are used to evaluate enterprise model. These characteristics include: 1. Functional completeness- does the model represent informational necessary to complete a task. 2. Generality- is the model shared between different activities, is the design sector-specific. 3. Efficiency- how efficient is the model, does it embrace efficient reasoning. 4. Perspicuity- is the design simple enough to be understood by users. 5. Precision- does the design support specific set of task is there a core set task 6. Minimality- what are the model minimal number of objects As mentioned earlier, for an enterprise to cope with the current challenges, they need to be agile. An agile enterprise is normally integrated. In the next paragraphs, we discuss what is mean by enterprise integration and the various mechanisms available to achieve integration. Enterprise integration Enterprise integration is a business technical concept that focuses on the topics such as system connectivity, product and data exchange and distributed computing environment. The focus of enterprise integration is to provide the enterprise with the right information at the right time and place to enable communication between people and machines and their efficient coordination and cooperation. In the modern world, business cannot survive alone (Dehnert & Aalst, 2010). Users expect to have access to all business functions available, regardless of the system that the functionality resides. This calls for connection of desperate application into a larger intergraded solution. The integration is usually achieved through some of the mechanism discussed below. In addition, as mentioned earlier, enterprise integration is the key to creating an agile enterprise, to cope with numerous challenges that they face. As mentioned earlier business, process re-engineering address structural integration reorganizing an enterprise along the critical business process. Similarly, behavior and information integrations of an enterprise are also very important. Enterprise integrations are defined as managing dependencies between different activities. The dependencies here may involve: 1. resource and activity dependencies (organizational departments/units, decision makers, internal and external business process, application and data) 2. Common software and human mechanism (emails, collaborative software’s, performance metrics’, data dictionaries, workflow, job design etc) 3. Supporting infrastructural elements (organizational policies and structures, standards, networks, platform and system architecture etc) Normally, a range of technical and organization integrations is needed at high granularity. The role of intergraded structures is to support integrations in the use of material, human and financial recourses of an enterprise. For this reason, effective coordination requires an attention of elements from different level. Approach to integrations Before discussing the various mechanisms of integrating enterprises it is worthwhile noting that, three approaches can be followed when integrating enterprises. They include includes; Sequential integrations, database integrations, and Message integrations. Sequential integrations: These systems involve the movement of decks of output cards to the tray of the next program. For instance the advent of job control language, where the language enables a series of computer program to be linked together. Database integrations: this approach involves different application to sharing information by reading and writing to the same database server. Massage integration: this is modern approach of integration, where system are defined in term of their message. Dehnert, and Aalst, (2010) state that each part of a system is an independent entity, and can send or receive a massage. Software bus With the above approaches, the commonly used mechanism of integrations across an enterprise include: Integration using files: for instance if an enterprise create a new telemarketing sale force, a new order management system that is associated with them might need to communicate with an existing sale commission system. In this case, a establishing a pinpoint system interface will assist the integration. Remote procedure call: this is the underlying mechanism for client-server computing. The system involves a client calling a server to request a response, and then waiting for the response. The servers respond to multiple clients and provide the response as fast as possible. EPR integration: this is a mechanism where a company integrates much of its operation by replacing, for instance, financial and manufacturing system with EPR system. Here all operation share same data model same database and same interface. EPR enables reporting function and division. Integrations using consolidated database. This is by far the simplest mechanism of integration. Database is shared across a set of application. Here a database acts as shared memory for numerous applications that assess it. Publish/Subscribe: this is one of the modern integration mechanisms. The applications that use this mechanism publish an event once. The listeners in other application are always waiting for an event so that they can pull it into the application. While most mechanism force one to one communication between the sender and receiver was making them know about each other, this mechanism decouples the communication so that the publisher may not know who is receiving. This system is an attractive mechanism for integrations in modern days. Each major application system publishes an event out on a bus. Then the system that need particular type of information subscribe. For instance, a risk management system might want to see the sale transactions and stock markets quotes. Under this mechanism, the risk management is built or integrated to see sale transactions, without altering the sale or quote system that may not know that risk management exist. Enterprise application integration: Also, this new infrastructure ties together process that reach across large number of system. This system normally ships with universal data model, mapping all commonly packaged system database field into a single field. This mechanism is unique in that it features a process rather than a message. Here the role of a broker is to pull process information into a central control. By integrating processes, it is possible to link disparate system by specifying the data to be moved and the compensating transactions to be fired in case of failures. Once created, the brokers handle the sequential and data integration between legacy systems. One of way through which this is achieved is by sending a XML message converter that will invoke the legacy system into their preferred data format (Barjis, 2008). Web service: These new set of standards creates a way of program to discover other service on the internet automatically and then apply those services to Cary out a task. This model is oriented toward outside enterprise. Agent-based methods: agent flourishes where there are many web services. They allow delegation of a difficult transaction task. The agent can take an instruction from a program and autonomously locate an appropriate service, use them and return the result. Agent can be used to carry out simple and complex tasks. Workflow: With workflow system management, it is possible to integrate both system and organizational aspect as discussed earlier. The process of integration between enterprises One important thing to note about enterprise integrations is that it needs proper planning. An enterprise integration plan will have similar structures, and therefore, setting a framework that promotes integration by defining the standards mechanism for connection between process and application is of great importance. Once the standards are set, and processes defined, then individual systems can be built imaginatively within the defined frameworks. It is important to note that for enterprise integration to work, all elements, or dependable activities as discussed earlier warrants consideration. At an organizational level, the limit of human cognition, the issues of behavior, difficulties of aligning individual goals with organizational goals and need of faster change bring the challenge of integrations. Although the information availability present a new challenge to managers and architects, networked organizations act, and interact better in a world that is moving faster than before (Auramaki et al., 2009). Conclusion Despite the numerous challenges that enterprise face, they have to remain comparative to survive. For an enterprise to remain successful, they must always manufacture high quality products and services and customized to the needs of the local markets. In addition, they must be open, such that they may be intergraded with other product and services. In addition, firms need to become environment- friendly and technologically advanced. These capabilities can only be achieved by an agile enterprise. Agile firms are integrated in term of structural behavior and information. It is impossible for a firm to be integrated without the use of highly developed information infrastructure. In other words, achieving business integration call for development of information structure that support communications of ideals, knowledge and information as well as coordination of action. The enterprise model is at the heart of this infrastructure. References Arnowitz, J, Arent, M., Berger, N 2007, Effective prototyping for software makers. Elsevier, Inc, Sydney. Auramaki, E., Lehtinen, E. and Lyytinen, K. 2009 A speech-act-based office modeling approach, Int. Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp 126-152. Barjis, J, 2008, The Importance of business process modeling in software Systems Design. Journal of The Science of Computer Programming Vol. 6, No. 2, pp 153-172. Dehnert, J., & Aalst, W, 2010, Bridging the gap between business models andworkflow specifications. Int. Journal of Cooperative Information Systems Vol. 7, No. 2, pp 134-145. Flores, F,2008, Computer systems and the design of organizational interaction, Int. Journal of Cooperative Information Systems, Vol. 4, No. 7, pp 13-47. Read More