Structural Analysis of a Business Enterprise

Ying Tat Leung () and Jesse Bockstedt ()
Additional contact information
Ying Tat Leung: IBM Research Division, Almaden Research Center, 650 Harry Road, San Jose, CA 95120
Jesse Bockstedt: Information Systems and Operations Management, School of Management, George Mason University, 4400 University Drive, Fairfax, VA 22030

Service Science, 2009, vol. 1, issue 3, 169-188

Abstract: A business enterprise is composed of a number of entities, such as resources, people, activities, and products. These entities are sometimes collectively called the business architecture of the enterprise and are clearly useful for information system design and integration. In this paper we show how these entities can be useful far beyond information system related purposes. We introduce the concept of structural analysis, which is a methodology for analyzing the different relationships between these entities. One or few selected relationships give rise to a representation or view of the enterprise. As we demonstrate through a simple yet illustrative example of a hypothetical coffee shop business, these different views can provide many insights and points of analysis valuable for various purposes. Structural analysis provides an interactive, analytical environment for a user to examine an enterprise from multiple perspectives, an approach not unlike On-Line Analytical Processing (OLAP) but for analyzing the qualitative or structural aspects of the enterprise. [ Service Science , ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]

Keywords: business architecture; enterprise architecture; enterprise ontology; business analytics; process data warehousing; structural analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/serv.1.3.169 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:orserv:v:1:y:2009:i:3:p:169-188

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Service Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().