Towards an Understanding of Model-Driven ProcessConfiguration and its Support at Large

摘要

The common presupposition of Enterprise Systems (ES) is that they lead to significant efficiency gains. However, this is onlythe case for well-implemented ES that meet organisational requirements. The list of major ES implementation failures is aslong as the list of success stories. We argue here that this arises from a more fundamental problem, the functionalist approachto ES development and provision. As long as vendors will continue to develop generic, difficult-to-adapt ES packages, thisproblem will prevail because organisations have a non-generic character. A solution to this problem can only consist inrethinking the way ES packages are provided. We propose a strict abstraction layer of ES functionalities and theirrepresentation as conceptual models. ES vendors must provide sufficient means for configuring these conceptual models. Wediscuss in this paper what generic situations can occur during process model configuration in order to understand processmodel configuration in depth.