Information systems framework for enterprise agility

Modern day enterprises operate and transact in an increasingly dynamic business environment. As a result, they are vulnerable to spontaneous changes and uncertainties. These usually reduce effectiveness and optimal performances in enterprises, and can have negative impacts such as loss of competitiveness, and bankruptcy. Enterprise agility, i.e., the ability of enterprises to respond to changes, is a core imperative for effective change management. Yet, it is challenging, difficult to achieve, and a major concern for corporate executives. Enterprises would thus require novel approaches to manage changes and enhance agility. In order to facility or achieve enterprise agility, it would be necessary and vital to develop frameworks or processes that can support effective change management. Such frameworks or processes should include techniques for modelling enterprises changes explicitly, so as to enhance the understanding of how changes relate to or affect enterprises. In addition, there should be techniques for deriving the elements of an enterprise, e.g., business process and data entities, that are required to adapt a given enterprise change. However, concepts, constructs, and techniques for representing changes are often neglected, if available at all, in the existing enterprise modelling approaches such as TOGAF and ZACHMAN.
This contributes to the difficulty in applying the existing enterprise modelling approaches to enhance enterprise agility and effective change management. The work described in this thesis provides a novel approach for supporting enterprise agility and change management. Therefore, this thesis contributes a conceptual process or framework for representing enterprise changes, and deriving enterprise elements such as data entity, business goal, and business process required to adapt a given change. Other contributions made by this approach include a novel conceptual modelling language for representing enterprise changes, an enterprise modelling language, and a set of procedures and rules that can be used to derive the new domain elements required to adapt changes. An industry case study has been used to test the utility of this framework. The results obtained from this case study shows that this framework supports enterprise agility and change management in a number of ways.