Object-oriented enterprise analysis

Faced with ever-increasing competition, business enterprises are relying more and more on information and information technology as a means to gain a substantial and sustainable competitive advantage. However, investment in technology alone is not enough. An enterprise needs to have an overall architecture, mapping out its needs for information, information systems, and the supporting technology. Enterprise analysis is an information planning process whose aim is to understand, represent, communicate, and validate the essential business concepts of an enterprise through conceptual modeling. This research extends the current business and information systems planning methodologies by using the object-oriented concepts which result in a set of enterprise analysis models--structural, functional, and dynamic--to represent the information structure, functional, and time-dependent behavior of an enterprise. With the object formalism, this set of models provides an important framework to guide the reengineering and the automation of business processes. This research demonstrates that object-oriented enterprise analysis can be used to develop an ontology for the strategic management process of an enterprise. The object collaboration diagram, developed in this research, uses object concepts for enterprise functional modeling; resulting in a functional model that shares object concepts with the other models. As a result, the semantic gap between enterprise analysis and system analysis is reduced. Finally, this research has formulated a set of methods required to develop an enterprise functional model and then to elaborate, from the general to the specific, the enterprise analysis models.