Enterprise architecture approach for project-based organizations modeling, design, and analysis: An ontology-driven tool proposal

Abstract

Project-based organizations (PBOs) rely on project management as their core business process. These organizations are characterized by their disaggregated structure and diverse authority distribution, leading to complications in synchronizing projects, governance, and functional divisions. In this regard, there is a need of a tool to manage this complexity. This paper introduces a novel approach – the IModel- for modeling, designing and analyzing PBOs, following the Design Science Research Method, that seeks to is creating an artifact that solves a real-world problem in a specific context. This artifact is developed through a conceptual integration between project management (PM) and enterprise architecture (EA) sources based on ontologies. Ontologies are powerful, machine-readable graph-structured models which enables sophisticated models’ reasoning and querying. IModel fuses the organizational domain from the ArchiMate EA language with PM insights from PMBOK 7th edition. The resulting IModel has been submitted to an expert’s judgement to assess its intended purposes as well, its potential to be applied in the real-world to support the PBO.