Engineering Business Processes: Comparing Prescriptive Guidelines from EO and NSBP

摘要

Both Enterprise Ontology and Normalized Systems can be considered as theories provide prescriptive guidelines to design systems. Enterprise Ontology explicitly focuses on the design of organizations as being social systems. Originally, Normalized Systems focused on the design of evolvable software systems. However, it has been shown that, building on the Normalized Systems design knowledge, prescriptions for other domains, such as business processes, can be proposed as well. This domain seems to overlap at least partially with the domain of Enterprise Ontology, which is used to establish claims concerning process design in various publications. However, both theories are based on completely different kernel theories. Therefore, this paper analyzes to which extent the guidelines proposed for the Normalized Systems Business Processes are consistent, complementing or conflicting with prescriptions from Enterprise Ontology. This analysis is complemented by means of a case study elaborated from both approaches. A consistent set of prescriptions could lead to a more integrated approach for designing integrated organizations, business processes and software systems.