Reducing ambiguity during enterprise design

Abstract

Requirements elicitation is one of the most important phases in the design process and applied by many engineering disciplines. A more recent application of the design process is to design the enterprise as an artefact, also called enterprise engineering (EE). Even though there are limits to formal enterprise design due to enterprise complexity, strategic intentions are not realised spontaneously or accidently. Intentional enterprise design is required, starting with the strategic context, eliciting enterprise intentions. Similar to the ad hoc evolution of enterprises, EE as a discipline also developed in a fragmented way with enterprise design knowledge mostly encapsulated in several enterprise design approaches. A previous study analysed eight different enterprise design/alignment approaches, inductively developing a common framework to represent and compare these approaches in terms of four main components. One of the components represents the scope of enterprise design/alignment in terms of three dimensions: design domains, intentions and constraints, and enterprise scope. Since existing approaches use inconsistent means of defining the first dimension, namely the design domains, previous work already provides some guidance on demarcating design domains in a more consistent way. This article focuses on the second dimension, i.e. intentions and constraints, and the need to distinguish between different intention-related concepts to reduce possible ambiguity. The study applies design science research to develop a method for enterprise intentions concept clarification (MEICC) as a theoretical contribution. The study also offers a practical contribution, demonstrating how the MEICC was used to clarify intention-related concepts that feature within a specific approach, namely Hoogervorst’s approach. A coding strategy (including coding conditions, a refined codebook and a coding method), developed for Hoogervorst’s approach via MEICC, is presented as a secondary contribution, since the coding strategy will also be useful to practitioners that use Hoogervorst’s approach.