A new paradigm for continuous alignment of business and IT: combining enterprise architecture modeling and enterprise ontology

Abstract

The ability to react timeously to continuous and unexpected change is called agility and is an essential quality of the modern enterprise. Being agile has consequences for the engineering of enterprises and enterprise information systems. We propose a new paradigm for next generation enterprise information systems, which shifts the development approach of model-driven engineering to continuous adaptation of the agile enterprise. We propose a metamodeling approach, which supports both human-interpretable representations, i.e. graphical models, and machine-interpretable representations, namely enterprise ontologies. Furthermore, we describe next generation enterprise information systems, which embed modeling tools and algorithms for model analysis.