=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Experiences from Teaching Enterprise Modelling to Students of Information Systems
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1023/paper11.pdf
|volume=Vol-1023
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/ifip8-1/PetersenK13
}}
==Experiences from Teaching Enterprise Modelling to Students of Information Systems==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1023/paper11.pdf
Experiences from Teaching Enterprise Modelling to
Students of Information Systems
Sobah Abbas Petersen1,2 and John Krogstie2
1
SINTEF Technology & Society, Norway
sobah.petersen@sintef.no
2
Norwegian University of Science & Technology, Norway
krogstie@idi.ntnu.no
Abstract. In this paper, we describe how Masters students at a university study-
ing Information Systems adapt to Enterprise Modelling. The paper describes an
overview of the course and its design and the feedback from the students based
on a questionnaire at the end of the course. The feedback indicates that the stu-
dents found it helpful to be able to select their own cases for their modelling as-
signment, that they were able to relate their modelling assignment to the real
world and the theory taught in the course and that their confidence in modelling
improved during the course.
Keywords: Enterprise Modelling, Model Evaluation, Modelling Theory, Mod-
elling Practice, Aspects of modelling.
1 Introduction
The goal of an enterprise model is to support analysis of an enterprise and to model
the relevant business processes and how they relate to the rest of the enterprise such
as how the work is organized and resource utilisation. Enterprise models and model-
ling have been defined by several authors; e.g. Fox and Gruninger describes an enter-
prise model as a computational representation of the structure, activities, processes,
information, resources, people, behaviour, goals and constraints of a business, gov-
ernment, or other enterprise [1]; Bernus defines Enterprise Modelling as a collective
name for the use of models in Enterprise Engineering and Enterprise Integration [2];
and Vernadat defines Enterprise Modelling as a consistent set of special purpose and
complementary models describing various facets of an enterprise to satisfy some pur-
pose of some business users [3]. All these definitions suggest that Enterprise Model-
ling involves modelling several aspects of an enterprise and how they relate to one
another. In particular bringing in the business perspective together with the IT per-
spective is an important role of Enterprise Models.
This paper considers the practice of Enterprise Modelling where theory and
knowledge are applied in a practical manner to make sense for an enterprise. This is
important to ensure that the knowledge is applied in an appropriate way to gain opti-
mal results from the modelling.
As part of our teaching and research, we take an Action Research [4] approach to
investigate the best way to teach Enterprise Modelling to Information Systems stu-
dents. A traditional cycle of planning, action and reflection has been considered. Our
aim has been to improve the curriculum and teaching approach and practice by re-
flecting upon the previous years' courses and making improvements for the next year.
Our focus has been on how the students applied the theory that they had learned to
create Enterprise Models and how they ensured that their models served their intend-
ed purposes. We believe that in order to teach modelling to university students, they
have to practice modelling as a part of their education.
In this paper, we describe how Masters students at a university studying Infor-
mation Systems (IS) adapt to Enterprise Modelling. The paper will present our expe-
rience from three years of teaching Enterprise Modelling. We discuss the design of a
course for teaching Masters students studying Information Systems to gain knowledge
and acquire the competences necessary to do Enterprise Modelling in business situa-
tions. In particular, we discuss the design of the course which is based on theory and
practical aspects and engaging students by encouraging them to model their own cas-
es. The main aim of this paper is to validate our teaching approach and to obtain feed-
back from the students to improve our teaching practice and to identify best practices
for teaching Enterprise Modelling.
Feedback from the students has been obtained using a questionnaire at the end of
the course. The results of the questionnaire are presented and discussed in this paper.
(The paper [5] presented results from 2011 and 2012. Note that a preliminary analysis
of the data from 2013 was presented at EMMSAD 2013, but is not provided in the
paper.) The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section 2 provides a back-
ground of teaching Enterprise Modelling; Section 3 describes the Enterprise Model-
ling course on which the paper is based upon; Section 4 describes the observations
from earlier years of teaching; Section 5 describe some examples of models created
by the students, Section 6 presents and discusses the feedback from the questionnaire
and Section 7 summarises the paper.
2 Background
Enterprise modelling requires an understanding of the enterprise or business situation
that is modelled. Thus the course aims to bridge the students’ understanding of how
IT supports business and other situations and the role that IT plays in organizations.
The enterprise perspective takes into account the business requirements that will de-
termine the investments to be made by the enterprises to deliver their products and
services. This may require IS support for the enterprise to be able to perform their
processes effectively and to meet their customers’ needs. These may pose require-
ments on the IS support, thus driving the IS needs for an enterprise. This is illustrated
in Fig. 1.
Fig. 1. Enterprise and IS perspectives
Enterprise modelling courses are offered at a few other universities too. For exam-
ple, at University of Duisberg-Essen in Germany1, the course on Enterprise Modelling
teaches specific modelling methods such as ER and UML and includes presentation
by students. A course offered at Jonkoping University2 in Sweden includes practical
hands-on modelling seminars in groups, group modelling sessions, and review semi-
nars of the group assignment. The course reported in this paper is a Masters and PhD
course in the Dept. of Computer and Information Science at NTNU. At this stage of
their studies, the students have had courses in programming, computer science topics,
databases, software engineering, potentially including model-driven software engi-
neering, and information systems, and have experience in modeling with UML and
BPMN.
3 Course Design
The main aim of the course is to prepare our IS students to be ready to do Enterprise
Modelling when they finish their Masters course. It is a Masters course attended by
both Masters and PhD students for one semester. During 2011 and 2012, the course
had 15 participants per year. In 2013, 21 students took the course, 3 of whom were
PhD students. The students are mainly from the Dept. of Computer and Information
Science who had already taken courses in IS-related subjects, which focused on sev-
eral modelling techniques such as UML and BPMN. A few students are international
Masters students and a few are from other faculties such as Mechanical Engineering.
The course consists of lectures spread over 11 weeks, and a mandatory modelling
assignment. Attending the lectures was optional.
The course aimed at bridging the theory and practice of Enterprise Modelling and
the design of the course are influenced by this. Some of the modelling techniques that
1
(http://www.wi-inf.uni-duisburg-essen.de/FGFrank/index.php?lang=en&groupId=1&
contentType=Course&generalModuleNumber=test2)
2
https://hj.se/sitevision/proxy/jth/student/...html/.../TVMD28.pdf
were taught in the course include i* [6] and IDEF03. The course is based on two main
activities:
1. The theory part of the course which consisted of traditional lectures. The curricu-
lum is based on a collection of articles. The main topic included modelling meth-
ods for stakeholder and the early phases on requirements modelling, Product Mod-
elling, Process Modelling, Enterprise Modelling and Enterprise Architecture. The
lectures were given by the course teacher and two guest lectures were given by
others.
2. The practical part of the course which consisted of an individual modelling as-
signment where the students had to analyse a situation, create a model, present it to
the class and write a report.
In this paper we focus on the practical part of the course consisting of the model-
ling assignment. The approach taken was that students learn Enterprise Modelling by
applying the theory to practice. The practical part of the course is designed to support
learning by doing [7] and reflection [8]. Following Kolb's experiential learning cycle,
the students have a concrete experience by creating their models.
Enterprise modelling requires an understanding of the enterprise or business situa-
tion that is modelled. In practice, Enterprise modelling is conducted as a team includ-
ing the modelling expert, who conducts the modelling and the domain expert, who has
in-depth knowledge and experience on the situation or the modelling domain [9].
Enterprise modelling involves externalisation of knowledge, sometime knowledge
that is tacit. Therefore, modelling experts and facilitators require experience support-
ing the externalisation of tacit knowledge [10] from the domain experts. In the course,
we didn't have any domain experts. Since the students worked individually on their
assignments, they had to act as the domain experts. The students were asked to select
their own case for the modelling assignment for a number of reasons; they needed a
case for which they could act as the domain expert as well as the modelling expert, to
ensure a close affiliation between the modeller and the knowledge and ownership of
the knowledge to support their learning. To find a realistic case for the students, it was
decided that it is best for the students to find their own case that was meaningful for
them.
The students were required to present their models to the class 3 weeks before they
had to submit the final model and the report. This part of the assignment supports the
reflection part of Kolb's experiential learning cycle [7] where the students reflect on
what they have modeled as well as make an attempt to articulate their models in a
manner that is understandable for the audience. The students then receive feedback
from their peers as well as the teacher. Through this, the students also learn providing
constructive criticism.
The students were required to use the Metis Enterprise Modelling environment 4,
which provides a visual space and metamodels for creating Enterprise Models. Metis
was introduced at the beginning of the course and time was allocated during every
lecture to provide modelling support to the students as required. Specific requirements
were set for the assignment; they were required to describe their cases in detail, to
3
http://www.idef.com/IDEF0.htm
4
A product of Troux Technologies.
identify the users and stakeholders of the model, to describe the purpose of the model
and to use this to define how they will evaluate their model to ensure that the model
fulfilled its purpose, to create a model that included at least five aspects of an enter-
prise (e.g. processes, organisation, applications), use the functionalities provided by
Metis to selectively view the contents of the model (e.g. user-specific views of the
model), to evaluate their model and to describe the lessons learned from the model-
ling experience. Metis allows users full-fledged meta-modeling to introduce new
modelling concepts and notation to the metamodel, i.e. enhance the modelling lan-
guage; thus the students were asked to describe how they had enhanced their
metamodel wherever appropriate. This was to assess if they were actually capable of
appropriately represent a real-world situation as an enterprise model.
The students were graded based on the combination of the modelling assignment
and a written exam, where the modelling assignment counted 35% and the written
exam counted 65%.
4 An Example Model
In 2013, two thirds of the students chose their own case, while the others chose the
suggested case of developing a mobile app for language learning. Although the latter
case was suggested by the teacher, all the students had adapted their cases according
to their own understanding. The students who had chosen their own case brought
ideas from their own experiences and had identified a need for modeling the case.
One student modeled the roles and responsibilities for Abakus Linjeforening, the
organization set up by Computer Science students to arrange various activities for
themselves. This organisation is structured as eight committees, each with their roles
and responsibilities. One of the challenges experienced by them is ensuring that their
new members, several each year, are able to quickly get to know how Abakus works
and their roles and responsibilities and who they should contact for whatever they
need. Thus, a model was created to show these explicitly and one that could be use to
educate the new members of Abakus. The model shows the different committees,
their leaders and goals and the processes that are connected to them. The complete
model is shown in Fig. 2.
Another student modelled an online booking system for a physical therapy clinic to
design one to simplify the booking process for the patients and to decrease the secre-
tary's workload, while another modelled the processes in a retail chain of stores that
he used to work in to see where the problems are and in the hope to raise the aware-
ness of the management. All the students found their models useful for their situations
and sometimes identified issues that they had not foreseen prior to the modelling ex-
ercise. Almost all the models were of sufficient complexity, addressing at least five
domains of the enterprise (e.g. process, goals, organisation, people and documents)
and how they related to one another. The students displayed good knowledge of the
domain and had clear purposes for their models. They were able to use various view-
ing capabilities such as selected views and relationship matrices to use their models.
An automatically generated relationship matrix from selected contents in the model,
of the committees in the Abakus organisation and the people that lead each committee
is shown in Fig. 3.
Fig. 2. Example model: Overview of Abakus
Fig. 3. Example model - a relationship matrix for the Abakus model
5 Feedback from Students
In 2013, we have focused on validating our approach to the design of the course, in
particular, the practical part of the course which includes the modelling assignment.
Feedback from students was obtained through a questionnaire presented to them at the
end of the course. 20 students submitted assignments, 18 took exams, 13 responded to
the questionnaire (72% of students that took the exam).
The questionnaire was developed using the SurveyMonkey tool and made available
to the students online. The questionnaire was developed to obtain students' feedback
on the following:
General view of the assignment.
Assignment design and presentation.
Ability to relate the practical work with theory and the real world.
Confidence in modelling.
6.1 General view of the assignment
The students were asked: Did you find this course useful? On a scale of 1-3, where 1
is "Not useful at all", 2 is "useful" and 3 is "Very useful", 8 (62%) responded that was
useful and 5 (38% responded that it was very useful. Some of the comments provided
by the students in the open part of the questionnaire are: “The course gave me insight
in the world of modelling. There were a bit more to it than I first thought, so this
course has kind of "opened my eyes"”, “Gave me more insight in how to model enter-
prises” and “The course considers "the bigger picture", and you learn to think about
how (initiality) seperate domains are related. I found this very useful”.
6.2 Assignment design and presentation
The design of the assignment was validated by asking the following questions:
Did you find the composition of practical work and lectures suitable?
Did you find it helpful that you were able to select your own case for the modelling
assignment?
When asked: Did you find the composition of practical work and lectures suitable?,
on a scale of 1-3, where 1 is "Not suitable at all", 2 is "Suitable" and 3 is "Very suita-
ble", 10 (77%) responded that it was suitable and 3 (23%) responded that is was very
suitable. The students found it helpful that they could select their own case to model;
6 students (46%) responded that it was helpful and very helpful while only 1 student
(8%) responded that it was not helpful at all.
The students provided their views in the open part of the question: some were very
positive, e.g. “Selecting my own case, let me select something I was motivated to
model”, “This made the assignment awesome in my opinion:) I could select something
that I was already a domain expert in. Then I could just keep focus on the modelling
task”. There were some students that found it a bit challenging or various reasons, e.g.
“It was hard to come up with good ideas about the case, when I did not have anything
from the real world I felt I could use” and “I think this has both advantages and
drawbacks. I felt that selecting my own case ensures that it's a case I find interesting
and feel motivated to model. But at the same time it was hard to make sure that it
applied to what we learnt and understand....”.
The presentation was validated by asking the following questions:
Did the presentation clarify things for you?
Did you receive useful feedback from the class that helped you improve your mod-
el?
Did you receive useful feedback from the teacher that helped you improve your
model?
Fig. 4. Clarification through presentation
An overview of the responses to the above questions is presented in Fig. 4. 92% of
the students responded yes when they were asked if the presentation clarified things
for them. 84.6% of the student agreed that the feedback they received from the teach-
er was helpful while 15.4% disagreed with that. 30.77% agreed that the feedback they
received from their peer students was helpful while 53.84% disagreed with that and
15.4% said that they did not know. One of the aims of the presentations were also to
encourage peer reviews among students and to learn to understand others’ models as
well as to be able to present one’s own models. However, there was very little feed-
back provided by the students during the presentations.
6.3 Relating the practical work with theory and the real world
Validation of the relation between the practical work and the real world and theory
were done by asking the following questions:
How well do you think you were able to relate your case to the real world?
How well do you think you were able to relate your case to the theory taught dur-
ing the course?
An overview of the results when asked how well they were able to relate the case
that they had chosen to model to the real world and the theory that was taught in the
course is shown in Fig. 5. 9 students (69%) responded that they were able to relate
their cases to the real world while 4 students (31%) responded that they were able to
relate their cases to the real world very well. In the open part of the question, one of
the students responded with the following comment: “It is highly related to the real
world such that I am thinking of trying out my model in my work later on :)”.
Fig. 5. Ability to relate modelling cases to the real world and theory
When asked how well they were able to relate their cases to the theory that was
taught in the course, 12 students (92%) responded that they were able to relate while 1
student (8%) responded that s/he was able to relate the case to the theory very well.
None of the students responded that they were not at all able to relate their cases to
the real world or the theory. Some of the students comments in the open part of the
question are: “Quite a few of the theory lacks the fundamental "why" question. In
other words, why do we need this modeling language is not answered…..” and “As
often is the case, the real world has many more "grey" areas than the theory teaches,
but absolutely saw the link between theory and practice”.
6.4 Confidence in modelling
The students were asked the following question with an open response:
How confident do you feel in using modelling as an approach in your future work
related to software design and development?
Three of the students explicitly stated that they were “very” and “pretty” confident
of modeling and three stated explicitly that they will continue modeling and would
use it in their future work. Five of the students expressed that they had learnt from the
modelling assignment and would know how to create an enterprise model. Three stu-
dents expressed explicitly that they were not confident in modeling after this course.
Some of the comments from the students include: “I think It was good to learn and I
am searching for the next field to apply this knowledge rather than storing this
knowledge as garbage in brain“, “I would continue this work in my future work”,
“Not too confident, but I do believe with more experience that I should be able to
create good models” and “Not very much more confident than before the course”.
6 Summary
In this paper, we describe how Masters students at a university studying Information
Systems adapt to Enterprise Modelling. The paper describes an overview of the
course and the rationale for the design of the course. A questionnaire was used to
obtain feedback from the students and the results of the questionnaire are presented.
The course was designed to ensure that the students gained practice in Enterprise
Modelling and to act as a bridge between the IS courses and the business perspectives
of enterprise modeling.
The results of the questionnaire show that the students found the course useful and
the ratio of theory and practical parts of the course was suitable. The course included
a presentation of the modeling assignment which the students found helped them
clarify their cases and how to model an enterprise. In particular, almost all the stu-
dents found that it was helpful that they had the possibility to choose their own cases
for modeling. The students also responded that they were able to relate the practical
part of the course to the real world as well as the theory taught. The students respond-
ed that they had gained confidence in modeling and some indicated that they would
do modeling in the future.
Based on this feedback from the students, we aim to continue improving our course
design and teaching approach. In particular, we aim to conduct further studies to un-
derstand the process the students follow during their modelling work and explore
modelling in a team.
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