Patterns in Business Analysis and Enterprise Modeling: How to evaluate their value?

Abstract

Business analysis projects often are considered as activities highly specialized for the specific enterprise under consideration. However, different enterprises in the same industry or service area often show similarities when it comes to organization structures and business processes. This indicates the potential to reuse at least some of the knowledge from earlier business analysis projects in later projects for enterprises of the same sector. Different techniques and approaches have been investigated and proposed for supporting knowledge reuse in analysis and solution design contexts. This paper focuses on the approach to use patterns for this purpose. The major question addressed is the evaluation of the “value” of patterns for the business analysis process and the solution developed. The contributions of the paper are (1) a proposal for how to evaluate the maturity and value of patterns, (2) two actual pattern types and results regarding their evaluation and (3) a discussion of pattern use in the context of business analysis.