Tuesday 1 June 2010

Enterprise Ontology Practice

I have great news! Firstly, I have today (tentatively) put the last dot into my chapter on Enterprise Ontology Practice. Secondly, I have converted all of my Word/docx and Omnigraffle sources into LaTeX and vector graphics. I simply wasn't happy with the quality of Omnigraffle's diagrams (despite the tool's great modeling features), so I decided to go with Tikz/PGF instead. Granted, it took a great effort to convert my graphics, and for non-technical people it might be a hassle to manually sketch out your graphics inside a text editor, but the result is absolutely stunning. Below is an example of a relatively simple Tikz/PGF diagram, which frames the adaptive enterprise within first order systems theory: 


The above is a compressed PNG version, so it does not look as nice as on my high-quality PDF publication from LaTeX. It took me half a day to really get into Tikz/PGF, but once you get the basics it is really easy to build high quality graphics and diagrams. 

As far as the Enterprise Ontology practice chapter concerns, I have until now completed my examination of three EA modeling tools and their relation to organisational concepts from second order cybernetics. And example of this would be: how well does the tool handle fuzzy, semi-structured processes or human workflows? Another example is: how well does the tool model and capture the different dimensions of knowledge (as an example cf. Ikujiro Nonaka's SECI model for knowledge creation). Not surprisingly, this support is very limited; qualitative and interpretative concepts are merely limited to full-text meta data attributes hidden well behind the formal BPMN diagrams.

I am very excited about posting my results, but I yet have to wait a bit. It still requires a sharp pen and a peer review from my supervisor.

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