Enterprise Engineering : The Power of Standards

The e-business ecosystem generates pressure on modern companies to invest massively in technologies that can bring them into the digital world of business-to-business collaboration. In their race to become a player of the global information system, companies have accumulated many layers of software. This situation has generated what is now known as the software complexity issue. What is missing in most organizations is a mechanism that can align or "bridge the gap" between the concerns of corporate strategists and IT project managers considering the business-to-business collaboration issues. As a consequence, a new discipline has evolved, enterprise engineering (also known as enterprise modelling), to deal with enterprise architectures. The enterprise architecture describes the logical linkages between the enterprise business, information and IT infrastructure. Many standards for building enterprise architectures have been recently adopted addressing multiple modelling perspectives: business, design and technology. This paper will provide both a survey of today's enterprise engineering standards and a framework for identifying the appropriate combination that enterprises can use to enable ad-hoc systems-to-systems collaboration