ENTERPRISE MODELING:MODELING OUTLOOK

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MODELING OUTLOOK

In the mid-1990s, the BPR debate drew our attention from isolated business activities to entire value chains. Yet ‘‘entire’’ process management in most of the cases focused on the information flow within departmental, corporate, or national boundaries. Obstacles within those areas appeared hard enough to cope with. Therefore, interorganizational communication and cooperation were seldom seriously put on the improvement agenda. Consequently, enterprise models, particularly business process mod- els were also restricted to interorganizational aspects.

In the meantime, after various BPR and ERP lessons learned, companies seem to be better pre- pared for business scope redefinition. More and more, they sense the limitations of interorganizational improvement and feel the urge to play an active role in the global e-business community. That means not only creating a company’s website but also designing the back-office processes according to the new requirements.

Obviously, this attitude has effects on business application systems, too. While companies are on their way to new business dimensions, implemented ERP systems cannot remain inside organizational boundaries. On the technical side, ERP vendors are, like many other software vendors, forced to move from a traditional client–server to a browser–web server architecture in order to deliver e- business capabilities. Hence, for their first-generation e-business solutions almost all big ERP vendors are using a mixed Java / XML strategy. On the conceptual side, ERP vendors are facing the even bigger challenge of providing instruments for coping with the increasing e-business complexity. Business process models appear to be particularly useful in this context. While e-business process models are fundamentally the same as interorganizational process models, integration and coordi- nation mechanisms become even more important:

• Due to increasing globalization, e-business almost inevitably means international, sometimes even intercultural, business cooperation. While ERP systems were multilingual from the very first, the human understanding of foreign business terms, process-management concepts, legal restrictions, and cultural individualities is much more difficult. Because models consist of graphic symbols that can be used according to formal or semiformal grammars, they represent a medium that offers the means to reduce or even overcome those problems.

• Many improvement plans fail because of insufficient transparent business processes and struc- tures. If people do not realize the reengineering needs and benefits, they will not take part in a BPR project and accept the proposed or made changes. While this is already a serious problem within organizational boundaries, it becomes even worse in the case of interorganizational, that is, geographically distributed, cooperation. In the case of business mergers or virtual organiza- tions, for example, the processes of the partners are seldom well known. Yet, in order to establish a successful partnership, the business processes have to be designed at a very high level of detail. Thus, business process models can help to define the goals, process interfaces, and organizational responsibilities of interorganizational cooperation clearly.

• Up to now, we have mainly discussed strategic benefits of modeling. However, at an operational level of e-business, models are very useful, too. In business-to-business applications such as supply chain management we have to connect the application systems of all business partners. This means, for example, that we have to fight not only with the thousands of parameters of one single ERP system but with twice as many, or even more. Another likely scenario is that the business partners involved in an interorganizational supply chain are using software systems of different vendors. In this case, a business process model can first be used to define the conceptual value chain. Secondly, the conceptual model, which is independent from a certain software, can be connected to the repositories of the different systems in order to adopt an integrated software solution.

These few examples already demonstrate that enterprise models play a major role in the success of e-business. Some software vendors, such as SAP and Oracle, have understood this development and are already implementing their first model-based e-business applications.

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