Reference Architectures as Knowledge Management Tools Guiding and Supporting Enterprise Engineering
Knowledge management is an essential requirement for innovation, especially in initiating, guiding and improving the innovation process. It is a significant challenge to capture the planning and deployment of innovation that takes place within a company.
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Abstract Knowledge management is an essential requirement for innovation, especially in initiating, guiding and improving the innovation process. It is a significant challenge to capture the planning and deployment of innovation that takes place within a company. It is not only the individual components of innovation that are challenging, but also integrating all of those activities in a focused manner. This chapter describes the importance of enterprise design models and reference architectures as knowledge management tools and methodologies for guiding and supporting the enterprise design or innovation process. It also briefly discusses the Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture (PERA) and Master Plan as examples of enterprise design reference architectures. Keywords: Reference architectures; Enterprise models; Enterprise design; Innovation
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Introduction
Competitiveness of nations, industries and individual companies are all determined by their ability to appropriately innovate in a sustainable manner. Such innovations are rarely done without collaboration in both the pre-competitive domain as well as the competitive domain (and are normally linked to activities both outside and inside the company). It is the ability to collaborate in both domains that distinguishes more successful enterprises (entities) form the less successful ones in terms of competitiveness. It is a significant challenge to capture the planning and deployment of innovation that takes place within a company. It is not only the individual components of innovation that are challenging, but also integrating all of those activities in a focused manner.
A. Bernard, S. Tichkiewitch (eds.), Methods and Tools for Effective Knowledge Life-Cycle-Management, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-540-78431-9_22, © Springer 2008
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Integrating all activities associated with planning, controlling and deploying innovation projects successfully takes place in a solution space that consists of the design life cycles of: • the Enterprise, • the Product and • Technology. These are depicted in Fig. 1. Any project that is newly undertaken or currently in process can be viewed from a life cycle perspective with respect to all three the life cycles. One can thus attach a specific phase from each of the life cycles to the project at any given time (although time is not depicted in the reference space as virtual life cycles are independent thereof). As the project proceeds, each of the life cycles is expected to be at a certain phase, although not necessarily in a phase ahead of the previous, as they are virtual life cycles. Due to the interaction between these different life cycles, enterprise design can quickly become rather complex. Within the Enterprise Engineering paradigm, the enterprise is viewed as a complex system of processes that can be engineered (or re-engineered) to accomplish specific organisational objectives. Engineering rigour is applied by having a strong focus on modelling and analysis in order to understand the different elements o
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