Project Details:

This project aims to develop and create an awareness for the need to co-design business and IT systems to exploit the technological advances with improved organisational effectiveness. It is important that technologies are designed to leverage information and knowledge resources as the key enablers for high quality systems that can improve the modelling of an enterprise. The methods research described in this research reflects recent advancements in field of semiotics for utilising the available information, communication and knowledge. MEASUR methods provide a comprehensive technique to articulate complex problems, formalise operational meanings and ontological concepts used in the business domain and analyses the behaviours of agents to promote an integrated framework for complex enterprises. The SEDITA project has developed the theoretical foundations, methods, and tools to successfully evolve it toward an (IT and Business) information-integrated enterprise.

This project was built on the early 1970s research work supported by the UK Research Council which has evolved into an internationally recognised discipline of Organisational Semiotics. The development of this new methodology for requirements analysis and specifications "Methods for Eliciting Analysing and Specifying Users Requirements" (MEASUR) based on the concepts of Organisational Semiotics. The available techniques are tested on real case studies with industrial collaborators with mainstream users where the methods are applied to business problem for i) integrating the techniques and fine turning the methods ii) validating the methodology with industrial problem of reasonable size and complexity, iii) provide supporting tool, iv) acceptance to industrial and business users, v) an interface to the downstream software engineering phases

To achieve this goal the enterprise has to be unequivocal represented and associated with business, technical and social attributes. This research employs the use of MEASUR which is a method for eliciting, analysing and specifying enterprise requirements design to analyse the different views and dimensions of an enterprise requirements. This method has been used independently with satisfactory success in a number of industrial cases. The contribution and novelty of this research is towards the development of a fully integrated MEASUR, which start with the articulation of an enterprise, using semantic analysis method to model the relationship of an enterprise and norm analysis to study the behaviour of software and human agents to model their patterns with the enterprise under investigation. MEASUR is a semiotics enterprise modelling method based on the discipline of Organisational Semiotics (OS). OS rests on a philosophical foundation that is radically different from those underlying conventional approaches to requirement engineering. OS is the study of signs and how signs operate within an organisation. A case study illustrating the applicability of MEASUR is presented, to evaluate a problem domain, and to examine its application and significance in the modelling of complex enterprises. The research provides a stable foundation for future advance on applying MEASUR to meet the challenges of enterprise modelling.