An Owl Based Ontology of Scor Model: a Prerequisite for Strategic Alignment

Firms cannot be competitive if their business and information technology strategies are not aligned. Yet achieving strategic alignment continues to be a major concern for business executives. A number of alignment models have been offered in the literature. Enterprise Modelling (EM) can deliver models that are understandable by all participants and formalised enough to map the Enterprise Engineering and Reengineering activities directly onto the business process execution. However, models need terms (names, verbs...) to identify and describe the constructs modelled in the EM language used. To share business knowledge, a common modelling language is not sufficient. A common business language is required to share the understanding of any constructs used in the modelling language at a semantic level. The aim of this paper is to propose a representation of the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model in the Web Ontology Language (OWL). We use the SCOR ARIS model as a computable existing representation of SCOR model. In order not to start from scratch, we transform this SCOR/ARIS into SCOR/OWL. Finally, we explore the respective advantages of SCOR/OWL and SCOR/ARIS, and more generally contribution of ontologies since they are becoming a main issue of business modelling.