Design of a Domain-Specific Metamodel for Industrial Business Process Management

Abstract

Enterprises operate in fast-changing environments nowadays and experience the continuous need to adapt to changing circumstances and new strategical and technological developments. This observation impacts how enterprise information systems are analysed, designed, implemented and used. Focusing on the analysis and design phases, conceptual modelling methods in the field of enterprise architecture management experience a continuous evolution in research and practice. Existing methods are re-purposed for specific requirements, new methods are developed/evaluated in concrete industrial settings and coupling/integration techniques support holistic viewpoints. Nevertheless, current practices in the design and enactment of such methods, and more specifically their metamodels, are inefficient with respect to agile and iterative considerations. Within this paper, a novel design approach for modelling method engineering is discussed that builds on the notion of meta-models as conceptual structures. Syntactic and semantic operation on these structures aim to facilitate the design process following the design science research methodology. The approach is evaluated by introducing a case developed as part of the European research project GO0D MAN. In the context of the project an enterprise architecture metamodel has been designed, developed and deployed that supports an integrated viewpoint of conceptual model artefacts coupled with operational data visualisations to assess the effectiveness of design decisions.