A century ago, Taylor published a landmark in the organisational sciences: his Principles of Scientific Management. Many researchers have elaborated on Taylor's principles, or have been influenced otherwise. The authors of the current paper evaluate a century of enterprise development, and conclude that a paradigm shift is needed for dealing adequately with the challenges that modern enterprises face. Three generic goals are identified. The first one, intellectual manageability, is the basis for mastering complexity; current approaches fall short in assisting professionals to master the complexity of enterprises and enterprise changes. The second goal, organisational concinnity, is conditional for making strategic initiatives operational; current approaches do not, or inadequately, address this objective. The third goal, social devotion, is the basis for achieving employee empowerment as well as knowledgeable management and governance; modern employees are highly educated knowledge workers; yet, the mindset of managers has not evolved accordingly. The emerging discipline of Enterprise Engineering, as conceived by the authors, is considered to be a suitable vehicle for achieving these goals. It does so by providing new, powerful theories and effective methodologies. A theoretical framework is presented for positioning the theories, goals, and fundamentals of enterprise engineering in four classes: philosophical, ontological, ideological and technological.
Several academic studies have already been conducted to investigate the reasons influencing the adoption of open source desktop software such as Linux and OpenOffice.org. However, few studies have been devoted to determine the reasons for not adopting open source desktop software. In order to address this issue, we present a case study on the Belgian Federal Public Service (FPS) Economy which considered the use of OpenOffice.org, but eventually decided not to adopt OpenOffice.org as their primary office suite. This decision was to a large degree influenced by the fact that a large number of users within the FPS Economy perform data-intensive tasks such as statistical data analysis and reporting on a daily basis. Notwithstanding the fact that several reasons were actually in favor of the migration, we have identified several barriers that may discourage the use of OpenOffice.org in similar environments.
The emerging field of enterprise engineering provides a promising outlook for positioning relevant research. Enterprise Architecture frameworks which are frequently used in practice, but are often criticized from a research perspective, can be positioned in this field. The challenge for the enterprise engineering field is to provide a framework to improve such frameworks using a rigorous scientific approach. This paper aims to contribute to addressing this challenge by proposing components for a research framework which focuses on applying engineering insights to enterprise architecture. It first explores how current enterprise architecture frameworks handle issues relevant for engineering (i.e., complexity, change and integration). It then introduces additional components which could contribute towards a more systematic approach. These components are derived from the way the Normalized Systems Theory was developed, and successfully introduced engineering standards into the design software architecture.
The automation of all business processes and network management functions, and the web-enabling of those information systems, is proceeding at a rapid pace. It seems inevitable that the monitoring and control of most industrial equipment and industrial controllers, shall become webbased as well. In general, this industrial equipment is controlled through binary protocols, and is not able to support modern Internet standards such as XML. In this contribution, a structured framework is presented to web-enable the monitoring and control of various types of industrial equipment. It is both based on open software standards and component models, and on dedicated architectural design patterns. In order to describe the framework and its detailed design patterns, this contribution builds upon a recently proposed technique for the elaboration of architectural descriptions. The implementation of several management systems for various types of industrial equipment is described, and the results are discussed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.