Information Knowledge Systems Management

The literature offers a multitude of modeling and assessment techniques to represent differing enterprise stakeholder perspectives and interests in business process innovation. While each technique yields valuable insights into possibilities for innovating business processes, these insights are limited as they are derived from a particular perspective. This paper presents an alternate approach that focuses on multiple stakeholders with differing and potentially conflicting perceptions of the state of current practice and directions for future innovation. The proposed approach can be used to capture, synthesize, and reconcile multiple stakeholder perceptions to yield a comprehensive foundation for business process innovation.

Rather than being constrained by pre-conceived formalisms, this approach begins with subjective perceptions of involved stakeholders. The approach results in an informal as-is model, assessments of its strengths and weaknesses, and recommendations for how to innovate the business process. The approach encompasses four stages: engage process stakeholders; collect process data; explicate process knowledge; and, design process innovations. The argument combines the business process modeling and stakeholder analysis literature; it draws upon a case study of process innovation in a knowledge-intensive enterprise; and, it provides practical lessons for how to organize and support business process innovation based on stakeholder perceptions.

There is a substantial amount of evidence that shows the national economies are shifting to services and the nature of work has changed dramatically during that shift. However, the extent of research aimed at the better understanding and design of work has not increased. This is particularly true at the cross section of different organizational perspectives on work. As a result, researchers in different domains lack a foundation to communicate and collaborate with each other when they organize and design new modern work systems. This paper represents an attempt to understand and categorize the major stakeholders that make managerial decisions that impact overall enterprise performance when making the inevitable shift towards a services economy. It is recognized that each enterprise stakeholder uses a particular view, methodology, model, and tool to study and manage work. Eight views of work for eight different enterprise stakeholders are summarized.

Workflow management is a core component of modern enterprise information technology infrastructure that automates the execution of critical business processes. Since enterprise transformation typically introduces changes to the corresponding business processes, it is important for modern workflow management systems to provide effective support for seamless incorporation of these changes. In this paper, we examine a collection of selected workflow concepts and techniques that are significant for dealing with transformational changes. Especially, we will focus on notions and techniques that are directly relevant to enterprise transformation, such as workflow patterns, workflow adaptation, and workflow data mining and merging. We also include a short summary of business process management, the fundamental concepts of workflow management, and a discussion of workflow support for enterprise transformation to keep the paper self-contained.

We introduce an enterprise resource-planning architecture that helps ensure organizational success through operational velocity attainment. Operational velocity is a measure of effectiveness defined as speed in delivering products or services to market meeting all customer expectations in a timely manner, and decreasing time for the appearance of a positive revenue stream as much as possible. This new architectural model, the evolutionary Enterprise Resource Planning Architecture Framework, may be used to enable an enterprise to tailor its organizational process lifecycles by addressing the operational environment throughout its evolution. Operational velocity attainment requires an evolutionary approach to address the operational challenges that will be associated with a new emerging enterprise which is launching new technologies into the marketplace, or with an established mature enterprise seeking to transform itself. The enterprise resource-planning model will vary between organizations and organizational units, since it will need to be tailored to address the specific operational situation extant. The enterprise resource planning model may be used to define the organizational structure of the enterprise and its complementary enterprise resource planning architecture in order to address the operational needs of the enterprise. We focus on five key areas in this effort: operational velocity attainment needs, evolutionary enterprise resource planning model, enterprise resource planning architectures, organizational process lifecycle, and the associated measures of effectiveness.

The epitome of the modern enterprise is a large scale, geographically dispersed, complex entity. It interacts with other enterprises, perhaps large numbers of them, in many different locations, often with great frequency. It serves highly competitive markets, which may shift in a matter of days or weeks. Designing, planning, managing, and controlling the modern enterprise requires a supporting infrastructure that is capable, adaptable, understandable, and usable. While not all enterprises share all these characteristics, almost all enterprises are affected by the associated business processes and technologies. Over the past decade, Enterprise Modeling, or EM, has emerged as a response to the needs of those charged with designing and maintaining the enterprise infrastructure, and EM could well become the platform for developing not only enterprise infrastructure, but all enterprise decision support. As a result, EM may be a powerful enabler (or inhibitor) of enterprise transformation. This paper provides an introduction to EM, a brief history of its evolution, and an assessment of EM from an enterprise transformation perspective.

This paper introduces a strategic layer as separate and distinct from an operational layer found in a traditional business architecture framework. The motivation for so doing is to better understand the unique processes of such a layer so that they can be better supported by the enterprise.

Several architecture frameworks from various domains are analyzed in order to gain insights and test the potential viability and applicability of a strategic layer in the context of a high-level enterprise system architecture. Each is reviewed and assessed in terms of its potential contribution and/or applicability to a strategic layer. For completeness, architectures of human behavior and performance are also reviewed since they may impact the execution of strategic layer processes. It is shown that while some of the frameworks have applicability and may indirectly support the processes contained within a strategic layer, none of the architectural frameworks appear to explicitly support a strategic layer. However, analysis of the frameworks may inform how processes contained within a strategic layer might be better represented and controlled, and how this layer might be made more interoperable with the operational layer of an enterprise system. These findings lead to an elaboration of several research issues to better enable and support those executives tasked with leading and managing an enterprise system.