Challenges of Enterprise and How Enterprise Modelling Helps to Overcome These Challenges - Literature review Example

Executive Summary Enterprise modelling refers to representation, description and definition of organizational structure, processes, information, individuals, behavior, objectives as well as constraints. Enterprise modelling helps organizations in overcoming challenges such as aligning organizational abilities and strategy according to the operational environment; innovating products; responding to market/customer changes and demands in addition to reconfiguring business processes or manufacturing technologies. Enterprise integration is about providing the right information at the right place and the right time and so facilitates communication between people, machines and their coordination in attending various enterprise activities. Architectural elements provide a structured guidance in architecture description, procedures of designing architecture and architects’ organization. Architectural elements are supposed to work synergistically together for an enterprise to get maximum returns from business, technology and human resources. Enterprise Modelling Introduction According to Pereira & Sousa (2008) enterprise modelling refers to the procedure of creating models of an enterprise using process models, data models, resource models and such. Generally, enterprise modelling represents, describes and defines as well as structure, processes, information, resources, people, behavior, goals, and constraints of a particular organisation. The basis of enterprise modelling is knowledge regarding the enterprise, earlier models, reference models, in addition to domain ontologies (Sundaram & Wolf, 2009). Enterprise modelling handles process of understanding an enterprise business and enhancing its performance by creating enterprise models. This consists of the modelling of the business processes, business domain and information technology (Sundaram & Wolf, 2009). An enterprise is the economic organisation/activity component. The activities are vital due to their significance in developing and delivering products/services to customers. Basically, an enterprise consists of several organizational functions and operations like buying; manufacturing, marketing, finance, development and such (Pereira & Sousa, 2008). Challenges of enterprise and how enterprise modelling helps to overcome these challenges Generally, enterprises face various challenge that enterprise modelling helps in overcoming. According to Sundaram & Wolf (2009), alignment of the organizational capabilities and strategy in accordance with the operational environment is a key challenge that enterprises face because organisations should be able to respond and react to changes within the business environment. Enterprise modelling helps in realignment of the organizational structure and information-based capabilities and hence enables creation of a better strategic fit within the operational environment (Sundaram & Wolf, 2009). Enterprise modelling also facilitates changing of the organizational design where it is necessary to fit the business structure with the strategy. Additionally, organisations are constantly facing changes driven by deregulated and globalised markets. A high rate of change implies that the enterprise should have the ability of responding swiftly to changes and hence should be able to reconfigure capabilities and structures, in addition to the enterprise developing new products quicker (Sundaram & Wolf, 2009). Therefore, enterprise modelling plays a role in resource reconfiguration such as reconfiguration of business processes or manufacturing technologies to changes within market demand and at a rate that matches pace of changes (Pereira & Sousa, 2008). Resource reconfiguration normally focuses on creation of an integrated information flow across the supply chain in order to detect and identify demand signals at the customer-facing stages of the supply chain and configure the production stages suitably. This gives a challenge of how to integrate information pertinent to various value activities at various stages of the supply chain. Where the supply chain activities are implemented in specific business units, enterprise modelling helps in designing and implementation of how activities, resources and information are shared among the diverse organizational units (Pereira & Sousa, 2008). Another challenge is increase of information density. Increased information density implies that customers progressively base their decisions on price and features and this results to increased transparency in regard to price and quality differences and hence increased buyer power. Increasing density information implies that products are at constant risk of turning into commodities. Therefore, organizational management should make sure that their products remain differentiated and this induces the necessity of speedy innovation and as a result, for reconfigurable product architectures. This also implies that enterprises can take in and act on information regarding their clients and competitors. Enterprise modelling acts as a vehicle for tying diverse information sources collectively across organizational frontiers which enable organisations to respond consistently (Laudon, 2000). Another challenge is personalized expectations since customers progressively demand goods and services as per their preferences and at the same time they expect quick delivery. Personalized products normally result from combined products and services where configuration of special services and products is done as per the customer’s preferences. Therefore, enterprise modelling becomes necessary since IT applications support most products and services, and thus application changes and interconnection required enterprise modeling (Liew & Sundaram, 2009). Liew & Sundaram (2009) explain that shifting between growth and performance is another challenge that enterprises face. Because of globalization and low growth rate, organizational management tends to focus on achieving competitive advantage rather than high growth. More competitive environment implies that enterprises seek new opportunities for competitive advantages and improve their coordination of business strategies, share resources and exploit unexploited synergies (Power & Sharda, 2007). Enterprise modelling can sort out all this by integrating services across business units and creating applications that enable sharing of resources and exploitation of untapped synergies. Additionally, there have been many changes on diversification focus. Most enterprises now prefer related diversification where business units, geographical and functional units in business units are alike in regard to how value activities such as procurement and manufacturing are shared. Enterprise modelling facilitates sharing of resources, data, systems as well as business activities through shared services centers such as customer service or shared departments such as human resources and procurement departments (Liew & Sundaram, 2009). High rate of product innovation is another challenge facing enterprises. Speedy product innovation is important when competing within fast-moving markets where the capacity to constantly develop and market new products gives an enterprise a competitive advantage. The basis of fast product innovation is normally reusing architectural assets will efficient interfaces. Since innovation of products in most cases involves upgrading technologies; design of a new product can take place comparatively fast when the underlying production technologies are able to accommodate required changes (François, 1996). The production technologies normally are linked to component procurement activities that link to external suppliers, to testing activities to make sure that the end products undergoes the required quality, environmental and consumer specifications tests to product activities and marketing activities and such. In this regard, enterprise modelling overcomes this challenge by ensuring production of productions through a collaborative and multidisciplinary process, known as three-dimensional concurrent engineering (3DCE), where design, engineering, and manufacturing changes are carried out in tandem. The concurrency of activities requires high information sharing as well as sharing product design, engineering and manufacturing plan between various functional units (Laudon, 2000). Enterprise Integration Enterprise integration entails coordinating the running of all components of the enterprise working collectively in order to attain the best performance of the enterprise’s mission according to the enterprise management. Therefore, enterprise integration involves providing the appropriate information at the right place and the required time and hence facilitates communication between individuals, machines and their cooperation and coordination is important to solve some of the generic problems that businesses experience (François, 1996). Figure 1: Enterprise Integration Concept (Power & Sharda, 2007) For enterprises to stay competitive, they must produce products and services that arte of constantly high quality throughout the life of products/services, adapted to the needs of the local market, open in a way they can be integrated with other services/products, benign in terms of environment as well as technically highly developed (Gustas & Gustiene, 2003). The key to accomplishing these abilities is agility. Agility refers to the ability to constantly monitor the market demand and respond fast through provision of new products, services along with information, swift introduction of new technologies and quick modification of business methods. This therefore implies that there is a need to devise and operate an agile enterprise (Power & Sharda, 2007). The strategic principles of agility include: using an entrepreneurial organizational strategy; investing to expand the strategic effect of individuals and information on the bottom line; using the implicit organisation strategy as a dynamic structure for the internal and external aspects of the enterprise; and finally adopting a value-based strategy for configuration of products and services into solutions for the customers (Gustas & Gustiene, 2003). The industrial and implicit nature of the agile enterprise, along with the need for individuals and information to have a strategic effect, involves a higher level of communication, coordination as well as cooperation in and among enterprises. This means that the agile organisation should be integrated. Integration means the structural, behavioural, in addition to the informational integration of the enterprise (Fuchs & Suzic, 2012). Figure 2: Factors necessary for Enterprise Integration (Fuchs & Suzic, 2012). Enterprise integration therefore refers to connection and combination of individuals, processes, systems as well as technologies to make sure that the right individuals; right processes have the appropriate information and the suitable resources at the appropriate time. Enterprise integration focuses on optimization of operations in an environment that is constantly and unpredictably changing. This enables actors to quickly and accurately decide and adapt operations to respond to emerging threats and opportunities (Camarinha & Afsarmanesh, 2008). Role of various essential architectural elements in the integration of enterprise functions The elements of should work synergistically together since enterprise architecture allows an enterprise to think in terms of enterprise-wide solutions to get maximum returns from business, technology and human resource as well (Pereira & Sousa, 2008). Architectural elements provide a structured guidance and are categorised into three key areas: Architecture description: this area is involved on how documentation of the enterprise as a system from various perspectives. Every perspective explains one segment of the architecture and consists of the entities and relationships that tackle specific concerns to specific stakeholders (Scheer, 1992). Methods of designing architecture: This deals with procedures that architects follow. Normally, an overarching enterprise procedure, consisting of phases, division into lower level processes consisting of finer grained tasks. Basically, a description of processes is done using its goals, inputs, phases and outputs which may be supported by strategies, tools, principles, rules, and practices. Organisation of architects: This guides the team structure, team’s governance as well as the required skills, experience and training (Scheer, 1992). Enterprise architecture is the engineering and structure of the enterprise’s mission, organisations, functions as well as database domains to facilitate their extension and integration with other technical architectures like hardware, business information systems and business events. The aim of the enterprise architecture is to comprehensively identify what the enterprise is, it’s critical elements and to describe all the elements into their appropriate relationship with other elements. Business function: This refers to a set of hierarchically organisation text. Business function plays a role of describing activities carried out by a position in an enterprise. Normally, business functions are human based wholly and when support is required from a business support system a business event is stimulated. Business functions do not depend on enterprises and might be assigned to more than one business enterprise. Business information system: This is a computer-based business information system and its management is done through Metabase. Its role is to control operational cycles, subordinate business systems, employed databases and opinions. Database domain: This is hierarchically structured descriptions allied to a mission leaf. Database domain is used in identifying database object classes, enterprise data components as well as property classes. In most cases, property classes turn into tables within databases (Fuchs & Suzic, 2012). Mission-Organization-Function: This involves linking an organizational mission to a function. Mission-organisations can be linked to various functions and likewise a function can be linked to various mission-organisations. Linking of mission-organisation functions to business information system creates business events (Power & Sharda, 2007). Resource: This is a long lasting asset that valuable to the enterprise. Resources include facilities, assets, staffs, money even reputation and enterprise cannot be complete without a resource. Missions: Missions are hierarchically set textual descriptions that describe the subsistence of the enterprise. Therefore, missions are the ultimate objectives that evaluate the enterprise achievement from various business functions and organisations. When a mission is missing, an enterprise cannot be complete. Ideally, not all enterprises achieve their missions simultaneously. Achievement of missions is done over time and is revised constantly (Power & Sharda, 2007). Accordingly, enterprise architecture facilitates an integrated vision and global perspective of informational resources; discovery and elimination of redundancy in regard to business processes and hence reduces information systems complexity; contributes to implementation of information systems that represent common goals and performance measures for all managers and thus cooperation and competition is encouraged within firms and lastly it bridges the gap between business and technical domains (Power & Sharda, 2007). Conclusion Enterprise modeling refers to computational illustration of the structure, activities, procedures, information, resources, individuals, behavior, organizational objectives and constraints of a business or other enterprise. For enterprise to stay competitive, they should become progressively agile and integrated across their functions. Enterprise models are vital in the integration by facilitating better designs for enterprises, their performance analysis and operations’ management. Enterprise architecture denotes the models, document as well as reusable item such as components that represent actual architecture. Enterprise architecture is thus a framework of how a firm attains the current and future business goals and evaluates the major business, information, application, and technology strategies and their effect on business functions. Bibliography Camarinha M & Afsarmanesh M. (2008). Collaborative Networks: Reference Modeling. London: Springer. Fuchs, J., & Suzic, R. (2012). Introducing the european space agency architectural framework for space-based systems of systems engineering. In Complex Systems Design & Management (pp. 335-346). Berlin Heidelberg: Springer. François V. (1996) Enterprise Modeling and Integration: Principles and Applications. , London: Chapman & Hall. Gustas, R & Gustiene, P (2003). Towards the Enterprise engineering approach for Information system modelling across organisational and technical boundaries", in: Proceedings of the fifth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, vol. 3, Angers, France; 77-88. Liew, A & Sundaram, D. (2009). Flexible modelling and support of interrelated decisions. Decision Support Systems. 46(4):786—802. Laudon, P. (2000). Management Information Systems: Organization and Technology in the Networked Enterprise. Sydney: Prentice-Hall. Pereira C & Sousa P. (2008). A Method to Define an Enterprise Architecture using the Zachman Framework. Portugal: Nicosia, Cyprus. Power, D & Sharda, R. (2007). Model-Driven Decision Support Systems: Concepts and Research Directions. Decision Support Systems. 43(3): 1044—1061. Scheer A. (1992). Architecture of Integrated Information Systems: Foundations of Enterprise Modelling. Austria: Springer-Verlag. Sundaram D & Wolf E. (2009). Enterprise Model Management Systems. 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