Strengthening the Foundations Underlying the Enterprise Engineering Manifesto

The discipline of Enterprise Engineering aims for enterprises to operate as a unified and integrated whole. This discipline therefore adopts the mission to develop theories, models, methods and other artifacts for the analysis, design, implementation and governance of enterprises in a theoretically rigorous and practically relevant manner. The Enterprise Engineering Manifesto postulates the dualities of concepts function/construction perspective, blackbox/white-box models and subjective/objective as being opposed to each other in one-on-one relationships. Illustrated by the Pizzeria case, it becomes clear (a) that functions can be defined objectively, and (b) that a valuation perspective should be added that truly focuses on the relationship between a system and its stakeholders. These insights can support building stronger bridges between management and organization sciences – traditionally stronger in functional approaches – and information systems science, and computer science – traditionally stronger in constructional approaches.