The nature of the enterprise engineering discipline

Abstract

Enterprise engineering originated as a practice with most publications focusing on the practical facets without the underlying scientific foundation. Foundational works emerged from different authors in recent years, including Dietz, Hoogervorst and Giachetti. According to Gregor, the bodies of knowledge or theories encompassed in a discipline need to address questions related to four classes namely: the domain, structural or ontological, epistemological, and socio-political. As a departure point for setting a research agenda for EE, we argue that the four classes of questions could also serve as a basis to determine an EE research agenda. In this paper we argue that a research agenda for EE should start with the first class of questions, concerning the domain of the discipline and suggest that an existing model, the Enterprise Evolution Contextualisation Model (EECM), could be used to define the domain of the EE discipline.