1. The Role of Models and Language
Ulrich Frank

2. Multi-Perspective Enterprise Modelling10
Enterprise
Action System
Information System
© Ulrich Frank | Enterprise Modelling

3. Example Diagram of Enterprise Model20
Value Chain Diagram
Goal Diagram
Business Process Map
Organisational Chart
Frank, Ulrich (2013): Multi-Perspective Enterprise Modeling: Foundational Concepts, Prospects and Future Research Challenges. In Software and Systems Modeling. DOI: /s
Business Process Diagram
IT Resource Diagram
Object Model
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4. The Core of Our Investigation30
"Information Systems are linguistic constructions."
"Organisations are social constructions, that are produced and objectified through language games."
What is the role of models?
© Ulrich Frank | Role of Models

5. Future Enterprise Systems - A Few Demands
Integration
Reuse
Empowerment
Flexibility 30
Abstraction is the name of the game!
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6. Domain-Specific Modelling Languages40
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7. Essential Design Conflicts50
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8. Self-Referential Enterprise Systems60
“I want a system that is enjoyable to use ... This means tools that reveal their underlying conceptual model and allow for interaction, tools that emphasize comfort, ease, and pleasure of use.”
Donald A. Norman
"What is needed are tools for self indication, reflection and reconstruction by organizational participants - tools for making sense of their situation."
Richard Boland
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9. Multiple Presentations of Models70
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10. Synchronization as a Challenge80
generate
Is that problem really unavoidable?
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11. Inspiration How to represent in modelling tool?90
Language hierarchies with variable number of levels
How to represent in modelling tool?
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12. Instantiation or Specialization?
100
Sometime no clear distinction between instantiation or specialisation – both make sense.
Instantiation sometimes deferred to lower levels.
(Meta) classes may have relevant state.
(Meta) classes may have features that need to be derived or calculated.
(Meta) classes should be conceputalized as objects.
How could this be implemented?

13. Focus on Change & Flexibility
increasing relevance – not just a matter of competitive advantage, but a matter of survival
requires theories of the enterprise and theories of change
also: relax conflicts between prototypical patterns
fixed schema vs. loose coupling
bureaucracy vs. agile organisation
110
How can we prepare for change?
A model is the better the more possibly better worlds have been accounted for during its design.
© Ulrich Frank | Role of Models

14. Organisational Stability vs. Change
Essential Organisation
110
Line Organisation
Virtual Organisation
Object-Oriented Organisation
Functional Organisation
Stability
Flexibility
Bureaucratic Organisation
Functional Organisation F1
Matrix Organisation
Public Administration Organisation P1
University Organisation 1
Financial Industry Organisation 1
Financial Industry Organisation 2
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15. Multilevel Modelling and Language Engineering
130
Frank, U.: Multilevel Modeling: Toward a New Paradigm of Conceptual Modeling and Information Systems Design. In: Business and Information Systems Engineering. Vol. 6, No. 6, 2014, pp
© Ulrich Frank | Role of Models

16. Organisational Change
„This awareness of their language and their work practices as a vocabulary is a very important difference between the design and the decision attitudes toward problem solving. An awareness of one’s own vocabulary is the first step to questioning it with a design attitude and exploring how different vocabularies yield more creative problem representations and enable the development of better designs.”
Richard Boland, Fred Collopy
140
“To reframe, then, means to change the conceptual and/or emotional setting or viewpoint in relation to which a situation is experienced and to place it in another frame which fits the “facts” of the same concrete situation equally well or even better, and thereby changes its entire meaning."
Paul Watzlawick, John J. Weakland, Richard Fisch
How far should we go?
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17. Language: Powerful Tool – And Subtle Trap
"But besides intuition there is no other kind of cognition than through concepts. Thus the cognition of every, at least human, understanding is a cognition, not intuitive but discursive.“
Immanuel Kant
150
“Language is my instrument, but at the same time my problem.“
Humberto Maturana
"Philosophers have long wanted to understand concepts, but the point is to change them so as to make them serve our purposes better."
Richard Rorty
"It is one of the tasks of philosophy to break the domination of the word over the human spirit by laying bare the misconceptions that through the use of language often almost unavoidable arise concerning the relations between concepts ...”
Gottlob Frege
What is an appropriate modelling language?
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18. Two Prototypical Approaches
Reconstruction
160
"With modelling languages we aim at reconstructing domains of discourse by eliminating misconceptions in order to make models comprehensible and to allow for machine transformation/ execution."
Deconstruction
"The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for what which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue.
Jacques Derrida
What shall we do?
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19. Conjectures and Suggestions
Reconstruction is our regular business.
170
Once in a while deconstruction is demanded for to protect us from „getting trapped in webs of [our] own creation.“ (Morgan)
Challenge basic presuppositions!
Challenge the paradigm!
Focus on conflicting/contradictory design guidelines.
© Ulrich Frank | Role of Models