In order to compete with the global giants, enterprises are concentrating on their core competencies and collaborating with organizations that compliment their skills and core activities. The current trend is to develop temporary alliances of independent enterprises, in which companies can come together to share skills, core competencies and resources. However, knowledge sharing and communication among multidiscipline companies is a complex and challenging problem. In a collaborative environment, the meaning of knowledge is drastically affected by the context in which it is viewed and interpreted; thus necessitating the treatment of structure as well as semantics of the data stored in enterprise repositories. Keeping the present market and technological scenario in mind, this research aims to propose tools and techniques that can enable companies to assimilate distributed information resources and achieve their business goals.

This thesis explores the potential to unify three emerging disciplines: enterprise engineering, enterprise architecture and enterprise ontology. The current fragmentation that exists in literature on enterprise alignment and design constrains the development and growth of the emerging disciplines. Enterprises need to use a multi-disciplinary approach when they continuously align, design and re-design the enterprise. Although enterprises need to be aligned internally (across various enterprise facets), as well as externally (with the environment), most alignment approaches still focus on business-IT alignment, i.e. aligning the business operations with the information and communication technologies and systems of the enterprise. This study focuses on a popular business-IT alignment approach,called the foundation for execution approach, and its associated artefact, called the operating model. The study acknowledges the theoretical contribution of the operating model to establish the required level of business process integration and standardisation at an enterprise in delivering goods and services to customers. Highlighting the practical problems in selecting an operating model for an enterprise, and more specifically the practical problems of identifying process reuse potential at an enterprise, a thesis statement is formulated: The operating model concept, as part of a business-IT alignment approach, can be enhanced with a process reuse identification framework, when a business-IT alignment contextualisation is used. The study is divided into two research questions. The first research question addresses the current fragmentation that exists in the literature, which impairs reuse of the existing business-IT alignment knowledge base. An inductive literature review develops the Business-IT Alignment Model to provide a common contextualisation for current business-IT alignment approaches. The second research question addresses the practical problems of the operating model regarding the identification of process reuse potential at an enterprise. Applying the newly developed Business-IT Alignment Model as a contextualisation instrument, the study demonstrates the use of design research in developing the Process Reuse Identification Framework. The conclusion after the investigation of the two research questions is that the thesis statement was confirmed, i.e. the operating model concept, as part of a business-IT alignment approach, can be enhanced with a process reuse identification framework, when a business-IT contextualisation is used. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2013. / Industrial and Systems Engineering / Unrestricted

Knowledge and knowledge work are key factors of today’s successful companies. This study devises an approach for increasing the performance of knowledge work by shifting it towards a process orientation. Business process management and workflow management are methods for structured and predefined work but are not flexible enough to support knowledge work in a comprehensive way. Case-based reasoning (CBR) uses the knowledge of previously experienced cases in order to propose a solution to a problem. CBR can be used to retrieve, reuse, revise, retain and store functional and process knowledge. The aim of the research was to develop an approach that combines CBR and process execution to improve knowledge work. The research goals are: a casedescription for knowledge work that can be integrated into a process execution system and that contains both functional and process knowledge; a similarity algorithm for the retrieval of functional and procedural knowledge; and an adaptation mechanism that deals with the different granularities of solution parts. This thesis contains a profound literature framework and follows a design science research (DSR) strategy. During the awareness phase of the design science research process, an application scenario was acquired using the case study research method, which is the admission process for a study programme at a university. This application scenario is used to introduce and showcase the combined CBR and process execution approach called ICEBERG-PE, which consists of a case model and CBR services. The approach is implemented as a prototype and can be instantiated using the ICEBERG-PE procedure model, a specific procedure model for ontology-based, CBR projects. The ICEBERG-PE prototype has been evaluated using triangulated evaluation data and different evaluation settings to confirm that the approach is transferable to other contexts. Finally, this thesis concludes with potential recommendations for future research. / Computing / D. Phil. (Information Systems)