SYSLAB will organise a workshop on value modeling and business ontologies in Stockholm, Feb 9 – 10, 2009. At this International Workshop, two major approaches will meet: value modeling and REA. The REA (Resources, Events and Agents) model originating from the accounting domain is maturing to a conceptual framework and ontology for Enterprise Information Architectures in general. Value modeling is a business modeling approach that focuses on the value objects exchanged in business networks and that is supported by the e3-value tool set. Although the two approaches differ with respect to their main application areas, their ontologies have a lot in common.
The goals of this VMBO workshop are to bring together researchers with an interest in value modeling, REA systems, or the combination of the two, in order to present and discuss the current state of business modeling and to identify key areas for further research.
VMBO workshop web site
Anders Tell visits SYSLAB
Anders Tell from Toolsmiths gave a talk about effective e-tools for business people. Anders Tell has many years of experience of model driven architectures and has been active in several international standardisation organisations. Anders asked the question: Do business analysts, experts and practitioners have access to and knowledge of effective tools and models for carrying out business modeling, architecture, implementation, operations and follow-up? Thanks, Anders, for a thought inspiring seminar!
International Workshop on Value Modeling and Business Ontologies
SYSLAB will organise a workshop on value modeling and business ontologies in Stockholm, Feb 9 – 10, 2009. At this International Workshop, two major approaches will meet: value modeling and REA. The REA (Resources, Events and Agents) model originating from the accounting domain is maturing to a conceptual framework and ontology for Enterprise Information Architectures in general. Value modeling is a business modeling approach that focuses on the value objects exchanged in business networks and that is supported by the e3-value tool set. Although the two approaches differ with respect to their main application areas, their ontologies have a lot in common.
The goals of this VMBO workshop are to bring together researchers with an interest in value modeling, REA systems, or the combination of the two, in order to present and discuss the current state of business modeling and to identify key areas for further research.
Agreement with ARIS on BPM tools
The department has signed an agreement with ARIS on using their Business Process Management platform for teaching and research. Initially, it will be used in courses for Enterprise Modelling. ARIS is one of the leading vendors of enterprise architecture platforms.
“ARIS Platform provides integrated software products that help enterprises to continuously improve their business processes. These products cover every phase of a BPM project—from strategy definition and process design to transferring the models into your IT systems and monitoring process execution.” (cited from the ARIS web site)
New Project on Business and Process Models in Healthcare
SYSLAB has got a new project approved by Vinnova
Visualisations of patient centred process and business models in health and social care
What is Enterprise Modelling?
An enterprise model is a “computational representation of the structure, activities, processes, information, resources, people, behavior, goals, and constraints of a business, government, or other enterprises”, as defined in Wikipedia. Enterprise models have been used for a long time in information systems design, and it is possible to identify three main ways of utilising enterprise models:
- Models as sketches. Models are used as sketches to describe possible solutions to problems or to document existing solutions in order to facilitate communication among stakeholders. The idea is to use the models as informal support for communication and description.
- Models as blueprints. Models are used as blueprints for implementing IT systems and services. The idea is that the models shall be sufficiently precise and formal for programmers, database designers and other IT experts to build a functioning system.
- Executable models. Executable models take the idea of models as blueprints one step further. The models shall be formal enough to be automatically translatable into executable code. In this way, the coding step is eliminated, thereby reducing cost and risk for introducing errors.
Research in enterprise modelling has focused on three issues:
- What is the right balance between expressiveness and usability in enterprise modelling languages? A language for enterprise modelling can be highly expressive, allowing for preciseness and reasoning support, often through some logic based formalism. This is fine for building advanced and comprehensive models, but the drawback is that the modelling process becomes more difficult, in particular for business experts with limited time and experience of modelling.
- Which are the right concepts for modelling enterprises? There exist many different types of enterprise models: information models, conceptual models, activity models, process models, role models, goal models, business models, and so on. For each type of enterprise model, there also exist many alternative languages and notations based on different concepts. There is an ongoing search for the most appropriate concepts for capturing all the different aspects of enterprises, and how the resulting models are to be related to each other.
- How should you build enterprise models? Building enterprise models is a complex undertaking as it requires the contribution from many stakeholders with different perspectives, ranging from end users and business experts to management and information systems designers. Therefore, methods for building enterprise models are needed, and there is today more and more consensus that these methods need to be agile as well as participative.
At SYSLAB, we have worked on enterprise modelling for several years. Initially, we focused mainly on conceptual models, but in the last years there has been much work on process models and recently also business models.
A state-of-the-art survey of enterprise modelling can be found here. Download EMoverview.pdf
Second Value Modelling Workshop
Birger Andersson, Maria Bergholtz and I visited the second value modelling workshop in Tilburg January 17 – 19. Birger gave a presentation on the relationship between goal modeling and value modeling and I presented an approach for moving from value models to process models. More information can be found here. In addition to the presentations, there was much discussion about the future use of value models. Sofar, value models have been used for designing the “what” of business scenarios, but there is now much interest in understanding the “why” and the strategic aspects – goal modelling should play a role in this. In general, there seems to be more and more interest in value modelling today, as witnessed by similar workshops such as REA25.