Embracing Imperfection in Enterprise Models
Enterprise models are created to represent business and Information Technologies (IT) elements and to abstract the relation between them in one enterprise under study. They provide value for an organization when they are used to support enterprise analysis. The process of constructing an enterprise model is complex and requires demanding activities such as human observation, consulting sources of different natures, and interpreting unstructured information. Thus, building an enterprise model that properly represents the enterprise has a high level of difficulty.
The difficulty is based on two main reasons:
1. the enterprise size and complexity and
2. several uncontrolled factors that affect the modeling process such as sources quality and lack of information.
Models represent the state of the enterprise in a given moment, but enterprises change continuously, which implies that models are inherently imprecise. Thus an enterprise model may lack complete information and even contain imprecise or inconsistent information; then, they must be refined when new information is gathered from enterprise sources. Thus, model imperfection is inevitable in enterprise models. Then, it is better to include information in the model to represent explicitly certain problems than to ignore them and assume that the model accurately represents the enterprise. Modeling the imperfection implies creating other kinds of models called imperfect models, which contain information that can assess the imperfection. Identifying and measuring the imperfection of an enterprise model can determine whether the model is useful for further purposes such as analysis.
Lecture at NEMO2023
Date/Time: Thursday, July 27, 2023 at 14:00