| Enterprise modeling provides a strategic view for knowledge creation and management in an organization. With models for the structure and behavior of the organizational units and processes, enterprise modeling provides a unified view. Enterprise models enable understanding of the internal elements of the enterprise in terms of their inter-relationships and dependencies. A specific problem exists for enterprises in that there is no standard, unified process or an interoperable model for describing enterprise structures and behaviors. There are numerous enterprise modeling constructs, languages, tools, and processes for various elements of an organization, but there is no interoperability among them. A related problem for enterprises is poor leadership due to which many enterprise projects fail. The purpose of this qualitative research study was to explore concepts and methodologies for developing a standard, unified process and interoperable models for describing enterprise structure and behavior using principles of automata theory and to model leadership traits using cellular automata. In this qualitative study, a two-pronged approach encompassing enterprise modeling and leadership modeling was utilized. Enterprise structure and behavioral processes were studied using compositional automata, matrix operations on automata, and mapping of business processes to automata. New automata-based modeling patterns were defined and applied to the business processes of a bicycle manufacturing company as a case study. For enterprise leadership modeling using cellular automata, five dominant personality traits, known as the Big Five were considered. These traits are extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness or intellect. Each trait and its attributes were analyzed and state transition functions for cellular automata were developed for each trait. Using cellular automata techniques, the Big Five traits were analyzed and ranked according to their effectiveness as leadership skills. There were no human participants in this study. The proposed enterprise model was validated with a virtual case study that consisted of representative business processes. The leadership model was validated with previous studies in the literature. Several recommendations have been made for further research such as developing a markup language for automata patterns, using cellular automata to study supply chains and multi-product assembly floor scheduling, and sensor swarm studies. |
