Discovering the building blocks for the creation of dynamic enterprise system models: the organisational perspective

This Ph.D. takes the form of submission of a thesis by publications. It is based around thirteen research articles from refereed journals published over the period 1993–2004. It contains an introductory section providing the aims of the thesis and a brief resume of a current research project, which sets the key framework into which the research reported in this thesis has been placed. The main section provides an overview of the papers, tracing the emergence of new knowledge and tools and the link back to the common theme of developing the 'soft' enterprise building blocks. The articles themselves provide the wider theoretical context in which this emerging knowledge is set. The final section describes key areas for future research and briefly indicates the author's contribution to other co-authored publications. The papers themselves are included at Appendix 4. The focus of the work is the general domain of Enterprise Modelling (EM) and in particular the organisational perspective of EM. The thesis attempts to show how the author's knowledge and understanding of key 'soft' or organisational enterprise characteristics (e.g. culture, competences, roles, decision making, strategy development) and their interactions with each other and other enterprise characteristics (e.g. process and information infrastructure) could impact on an enterprise's performance. From this work some of building blocks for an overall enterprise system model have been distilled.