The epitome of the modern enterprise is a large scale, geographically dispersed, complex entity. It interacts with other enterprises, perhaps large numbers of them, in many different locations, often with great frequency. It serves highly competitive markets, which may shift in a matter of days or weeks. Designing, planning, managing, and controlling the modern enterprise requires a supporting infrastructure that is capable, adaptable, understandable, and usable. While not all enterprises share all these characteristics, almost all enterprises are affected by the associated business processes and technologies. Over the past decade, Enterprise Modeling, or EM, has emerged as a response to the needs of those charged with designing and maintaining the enterprise infrastructure, and EM could well become the platform for developing not only enterprise infrastructure, but all enterprise decision support. As a result, EM may be a powerful enabler (or inhibitor) of enterprise transformation. This paper provides an introduction to EM, a brief history of its evolution, and an assessment of EM from an enterprise transformation perspective.
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