Enterprise management is
influenced and guided by organizational viewpoints. When a particular viewpoint
predominates, resources are channeled into developing and strengthening the
organization in that direction. The orientation of organizational viewpoints
has migrated from marketing, resources, information technology, and business processes
towards knowledge and decision making. Each viewpoint has been developed
largely in isolation. However, integration began when the concept of
enterprise-wide IT was implemented in ERP systems; it is still unresolved
within managerial processes and knowledge management. In order to resolve this
challenge, we have developed a paradigm based upon the principle of integration
of organizational flows - processes, knowledge and decisions - as enabled by an
IT infrastructure. Our paradigm for knowledge for decision making is termed the
Integrated Enterprise Flow Model (IEFM). It combines business process,
decisionmaking and knowledge management to achieve an integrated model for
repetitive organizational decisionmaking within business process execution. The
IEFM incorporates five clearly defined components: a business process for
decision making; knowledge, information and data (KID) exchange objects; a
repository for the exchange objects; exchange flows - system- and decisionmaker-initiated
flows of exchange objects between process and repository; and an interfacing
mechanism - for executing and managing exchange flows. Moreover, a further
principle of JIT knowledge implies a timely, well synchronized flow of inputs
and outputs of an ongoing process; the IEFM operationalizes this by providing
existing KID to the decision maker and capturing and storing new KID created in
the process - both in real time.
