Highlighting the Gaps in Enterprise Systems Models by Interoperating CGs and FCA

Enterprises arise from creative human endeavours, articulated through business concepts encoded in enterprise information systems through a modular Enterprise Information Model (EIM). The EIM thus brings the productivity of computers to bear. Essentially, the EIM represents conceptual structures, which align the computer’s structured way of working with the human’s conceptual way of thinking. Using an industrial-strength SAP exemplar known as ‘Global Bike Inc.’, and expressing its EIM’s meta-objects as meta-object → relation → metaobject, Conceptual Graphs (CGs) simplified the EIM’s modules, which consist of four business layers and two information systems layers. The logical simplification of these modules is extended into four levels of detail that culminate in performance indicators being assigned to each of the six layers. From the CGs, Formal Concept Analysis (FCA)’s CGtoFCA algorithm was used to generate the meta-objectarelation → meta-object binaries that identified the pathways layer-wise and level-wise between the meta-objects. Through the interoperability of CGs and FCA, gaps in the conceptual structure of the EIM as highlighted by its performance indicator or measure, implying that the layer is not as modular as intended.