Creating agile business systems with reusable knowledge

Agility and innovation are necessary to achieve global excellence and customer value in twenty-first century business; yet most approaches to business process engineering sacrifice these in favor of operational efficiency and economics. Moreover, the IT systems used to automate and encapsulate business processes are unresponsive to the dynamic business environment. Mitra and Gupta provide insight to close this gap - showing how innovation can be systematized with normalized patterns of information, how business processes and information systems may be tightly aligned, and how these processes and systems can be designed to automatically adapt to change by reconfiguring shared patterns of knowledge. A modular approach to building business systems that parallels that of object oriented software is presented. Practical templates required for accelerating integration, analysis and design are provided. This book will appeal to consultants, analysts, and managers in IT as well as researchers and graduate students in business, management and IT.

• List of boxes p. ix
• List of figures p. xi
• List of tables p. xiv
• Foreword p. xv
• Preface p. xvii
• Acknowledgements p. xix
• Introduction p. 1
• 1 What is this book about and who should read it? p. 1
• 2 What will the information be used for? p. 2
• 3 Technology's broken promise p. 2
• 4 Component reuse - the genesis p. 4
• 5 Scope of this book p. 6
• 6 Foundation of knowledge reuse: three pillars p. 7
• 7 How this book is organized p. 11
• 1 On the nature of reality and the nature of business p. 14
• 1 The nature of knowledge p. 16
• 2 Modeling the real world p. 20
• 3 Metaworld of information p. 21
• 4 Basic metaobject inventory p. 39
• 5 Metaobjects and the natural repository of knowledge p. 39
• 6 The architecture of knowledge and the scope of the metamodel in this book p. 43
• 2 The object at the root of it all p. 51
• 1 Object class versus object instance p. 52
• 2 The state of an object p. 55
• 3 Inheriting behavior - subtypes, supertypes, and partitioning of objects p. 79
• 4 The problem of perspective p. 94
• 5 Repositories of meaning p. 103
• 3 The nature of attributes p. 112
• 1 The structure of attributes and states p. 112
• 2 Attribute constraints p. 122
• 3 Naming and expressing attributes p. 158
• 4 Domains and their expression p. 170
• 1 The meaning and architecture of format p. 172
• 2 The meaning of units of measure p. 234
• 3 Domains of meaning and the metamodel of object p. 252
• 4 Storing abstract meaning p. 324
• Appendix Key shared components of knowledge p. 327
• Bibliography p. 354
• Index p. 383