A framework for assessing capability in organisations using enterprise models

Abstract

Organisational assessments provide a view of the state of different aspects of an enterprise so as to understand its strengths, weaknesses and possible improvement paths. A relevant element used to perform assessments is the assessment framework, which contains the requirements that the entity must fulfil as well as other aspects. On the other hand, another essential element during an assessment is the Evidence, which is any type of data reflecting the state of the assessed entity. Among several possible assessment evidences, such as documents, e-mails, interview extracts, and questionnaires, Enterprise Models represented through a specific Modelling Language can serve as such, since they allow to describe diverse organisational aspects. Thus, they can provide useful information to be considered when performing an assessment. Notwithstanding, the analysis of the models is demanding in terms of time and resources, and reducing the effort to perform such analysis could improve the assessment process. Thus, a possible manner of improving the analysis process is to understand beforehand which type of information can be found within an enterprise model taking into consideration the modelling language that has been used to represent it and the list of requirements defined by the assessment framework used to perform the assessment. In this sense, this work introduces a method to identify the requirements, devised by an assessment framework, that can be answered through the analysis of modelling elements defined using a specific modelling language. We ground our approach on a Requirement Decomposition task following the Pseudo-Requirement Graph method, and the matching between requirements and modelling language elements following the Goal Question Metric paradigm. To validate our method, we perform separate evaluations of the BPMN and ArchiMate languages, to identify the set of requirements from the ISO/IEC 33020 international standard that can be answered through models that are defined using each language. We also introduce a case study based on the analysis of a concrete business process, following the proposed approach.