A Knowledge Model for Business Re-engineering Methods and Tools
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Date
1995-03-01T00:00:00Z
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Abstract
What do we need to know about the business in order to understand and, eventually, to improve business operations? Many business modeling methods have been described in literature and applied in business re-engineering projects. We feel that current business modeling methods do not have a precise enough model of the underlying business knowledge. A model should be comprehensive enough to allow for a systematic study and precise formulation of re-engineering methods. It should also provide a conceptual framework for designing tools to support business re-engineering projects. We identified information requirements for business re-engineering based on the commonly used business re-engineering methods and case studies published in the literature. We formalized these requirements within the business knowledge model that is described in this paper. The business knowledge models vary from company to company and from one business re-engineering project to another. Therefore, we build a generic model first and then we customize the generic model to needs of a given company and to a business re-engineering project in hand. We build the core of a tool environment for business understanding and re-engineering around the generic business model. The business knowledge model defines conceptual schema for the business knowledge to be acquired and stored in a tool repository. We derive the physical schema for tool repository and generate customized tools from the customized business knowledge model specifications. Tools built around our model can support business knowledge acquisition, business process modeling, performance/quality analysis and analysis of alternative business process re-engineering solutions. We use frames to model business features such as a customer, business process or event. Frames are organized into an inheritance network. Frame slots describe properties of features in the mixture of formal and informal specifications. In the paper, we describe the generic business knowledge model, explain how we use the model and discuss user-level views of the model.