Towards an Approach for Efficiency Evaluation of Enterprise Modeling Methods

Abstract: Nowadays, there is a belief that organizations should keep improving different aspects of theirenterprise to remain competitive in their business segment. For this purpose, it is required to understand the current state of the enterprise, analyze and evaluate it to be able to figure out suitable change measures. To perform such a process in a systematic and structured way, receiving support from powerful tools is inevitable. Enterprise Modeling is a field that can support improvement processes by developing models to show different aspects of an enterprise. An Enterprise Modeling Method is an important support for the Enterprise Modeling. A method is comprised of different conceptual parts: Perspective, Framework, Method Component (which itself contains Procedure, Notation and Concepts), and Cooperation Principles. In an ideal modeling process, both the process and the results are of high quality. One dimension of quality which is in focus in this thesis is efficiency. The issue of efficiency evaluation in Enterprise Modeling still seems to be a rather unexploited research area.The thesis investigates three aspects of Enterprise Modeling Methods: what is the meaning of efficiency in this context, how can efficiency be evaluated and in what phases of a modeling process could efficiency be evaluated. The contribution of the thesis is an approach for evaluation of efficiency in Enterprise Modeling Methods based also on several case studies. The evaluation approach is constituted by efficiency criteria that should be met by (different parts of) a method. While a subset of these criteria always need to be fulfilled in a congruent way, fulfillment of the rest of the criteria depends on the application case. To help the user in initial evaluation of a method, a structure of driving questions is presented.