Current trends of globalisation and increased competition require new forms of organisation and work support. Especially in small and medium sized enterprises (SME), the competitiveness and future market position of an enterprise is closely related to the ability of cooperating with partners in SME networks or virtual supplier organisations. In complex work processes with a number of distributed partners, high requirements with respect to competence and a lot of rules and guidelines to be obeyed; detecting and sharing knowledge among different members of networked organizations is an important issue. Based on an empirical investigation regarding the demands of SME and illustrating this demand with industrial cases, this paper investigates two technical approaches supporting knowledge supply in networked organizations: enterprise modeling and self-organisation of flexible supply networks. These approaches are presented with related work and their limits and potentials.

People around the world who are working in companies and organisations need to collaborate, and in their collaboration use information managed by different information systems. The requirements of information systems to be interoperable are therefore apparant. While the technical problems, of communicating or sharing information between different information systems, have become less difficult to solve, the attention has turned to other aspects of interoperability. Such aspects concern the bussiness processes, the knowledge, the syntax and the semantics that involves the information managed by information systems.

Enterprise modelling is widely used to achieve integration solutions within enterprises and is a research area both for the integration wihin an enterprise (company or organisation) and the integration between several different enterprises. Enterprise modelling takes into account several of the aspects, mentioned as important for interoperability, in the models that are created.

This thesis describes a research which has resulted in the connector view concept. The main contribution with this framework comprises a model structure and an approach, for performing the modelling of the collaboration between several partners in an extended enterprise. The purpose of the enterprise models thus created, by using the connector view concept, is to find solutions to interoperability problems, that exist in the collaboration between several enterprises.

The research presented in this paper has the objective to develop a process for transforming an enterprise model into an enterprise ontology. The focus is to preserve as much as possible of the semantics and the information content. A suitable approach to base the development of the transformation process on has been selected in a comparative study of three different approaches. The selected approach uses a meta-model to support the transformation process. The outcome of the research is both the improved transformation process based on the meta-model based transformation approach and a tool named EM2EO for processing the transformation. The tool reads an XML-file containing an enterprise model and produces an OWL-file containing the enterprise ontology.

Enterprise interoperability has been a research subject more than 2 decades and still offers numerous challenges for the scientific community. Based on an industrial case from automotive supplier industry and earlier work on variability modelling, this paper proposes to address enterprise interoperability by identifying correspondences and developing stepwise adjustment of enterprise models. The approach presented, called Connector Concept, puts equal focus on process and product knowledge when specifying interoperability requirements and has the long-term ambition to generate interfaces between IT-systems based on model integration. The main contributions of the work are (1) an initial method for connecting enterprise models of collaborating enterprises, (2) use of feature modelling for identification of interoperability requirements in product knowledge, and (3) an industrial case showing a concrete example and offering first experiences with the above approaches.

The work presented in this paper aims at contributing to enterprise interoperability. The focus is on collaboration in extended enterprises as general application field and active knowledge models as underlying technology. The starting point for the paper is an application case from automotive industry, where active knowledge models were developed for essential product development tasks. The paper concerns the development of a connector between these active knowledge models in order to support collaboration between two partners. The focus is on the operationalising phase of the connector development and on experiences. One result from this work is to propose three levels for the modeling, depending on the maturity level of the collaboration - searching for a partner, modeling existing collaboration and enhancing collaboration through detailed modeling.

We discuss how an Enterprise Modeling approach, namely C3S3P has been applied in an automotive supplier company. The chapter concentrates on the phases of the C3S3P development process such as Concept Study, Scaffolding, Scoping, and Requirements Modeling. We have also presented the concept of task pattern which has been used for capturing, documenting and sharing best practices concerning business processes in an organization. Within this application context we have analyzed our experiences concerning stakeholder participation and task pattern development. We have also described how we have derived four different categories of requirements from scenario descriptions for the task patterns and from modeling of the task patterns.

We discuss how an Enterprise Modelling approach, namely C3S3P, has been applied in an automotive supplier company. The paper concentrates on the phases of the C3S3P development process such as Concept Study, Scaffolding, Scoping, and Requirements Modelling. We have also presented the concept of task pattern which has been used in the MAPPER project for capturing, documenting and sharing best practices concerning business processes in organisation. Within this application context we have analysed our experiences concerning stakeholder participation and task pattern development.

Information systems have to be continuously updated due to changing requirements in the work environments of the enterprises. Enterprises are also changing their way of working towards networked organisations which demands a higher flexibility in the integration with different partners. Legacy systems represent valuable investments and information resources to take care of. Therefore there exists a demand to improve possibilities for changing and integrating software applications within and between enterprises. The intention with this paper is to penetrate the research that is being done in order to facilitate integration of software applications within and between enterprises. This involves enterprise modelling as well as software modelling.

Future work will concentrate on how to enable integration of software applications in the extended enterprise with changing needs, using enterprise modelling.