Modelling networked enterprises

The appearance of networked enterprises, in which Internet-enabled organisations work together for mutual benefit, gives rise to a change in the nature of enterprise computing. Enterprise computing today has to deal with application integration across company boundaries and support inter-organisational business processes, collaborations and transactions. It has always been important first to understand the business environment in which enterprise systems are supposed to function before embarking upon their design. Due to the inter-organisational nature of networked enterprises and the intimate relation between their business and their systems, this need is even more apparent. We analyse the requirements that networked enterprise computing places on enterprise modelling techniques, and introduce a new language for modelling networked enterprises. We also argue that the UML, while highly successful as a software modelling technique, lacks some essential ingredients for networked enterprise modelling.