Translating Ontological Business Transactions into Evolvable Information Systems

In order to obtain enterprise agility, a number of approaches have recently been proposed to purposefully engineer enterprises. A first category aims to engineer evolvable information systems to enable the IT infrastructure to quickly adapt to changing business requirements. A second category captures an organization's essence by engineering implementation-independent models. Although these approaches have their merits, they do not yet provide full traceability from the business to the information systems' level. This paper proposes an approach to create a deterministic, traceable path from ontological business transactions - represented by Enterprise Ontology models - to evolvable information systems - represented by Normalized Systems theory - based on proven principles. Our results describe a set of principles that have to be obeyed to derive such a Normalized Systems Business Transaction.