Enterprise Engineering - A New Organizational Discipline (1)

The e-business ecosystem generates a pressure on modern companies to invest massively in technologies that can bring them into the digital world of business. In their race to become a player in the global information system, companies have accumulated many layers of software that, in turn, generated what is now known as the software complexity issue. What is missing in most organizations is a mechanism that can align or "bridge the gap" between the concerns of corporate strategists and IT project managers. As a consequence, a new discipline has evolved, enterprise engineering, to deal with enterprise architectures. The enterprise architecture describes the logical linkages between the enterprise business, information and technical architectures and the enterprise IT solutions. Standards for building the enterprise architecture have been lately adopted in order to draw the architectural guidelines for enterprise engineers. This paper opens a series of articles that will provide an overview of frameworks, metamodels and technologies available today for enterprise engineering