Mario Sánchez

• PhD
• Professor at Los Andes University (Colombia)

In the dynamic Industry 4.0 landscape, organizations aim to enhance economic performance and sustainability. Business Model Innovation (BMI) plays a vital role, enabling firms to integrate disruptive technologies and maintain competitiveness. However, current BMI research mostly focuses on static Business Models (BMs), neglecting the dynamic intera...

Enterprises are inherently complex systems, which involve a multitude of components working dynamically and in coordination to obtain a desired end goal. The intricacy of an enterprise and how the different components can be modeled is the area of research of Enterprise Modeling (EM). When holistically modeling an enterprise, it is required to use...

Purpose This paper proposes a conceptualization of the e-waste domain, formalized through a metamodel, to express complex e-waste realities in a simple manner. This also enables the transition from a structural model to a behavioral model to implement analysis techniques. Design/methodology/approach The methodology used is design science research...

When modeling enterprises, it is necessary to capture, simplify, abstract, and organize a vast number of key organizational elements. These elements (e.g., organizational units, human resources, production processes, and IT systems) are frequently organized and modeled in the business and IT domains. The focus on modeling these domains casts aside...

Enterprises are composed of an enormous number of elements (e.g., organizational units, human resources, production processes, and IT systems) typically classified in the business or the IT domain. However, some crucial elements do not belong in either group: they are directly responsible for producing and delivering the company’s goods and service...

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has become the de facto standard for process modeling. Currently, BPMN models can be (a) analyzed or simulated using specialized tools, (b) executed using business process management systems (BPMSs), or (c) used for requirements elicitation. Although there are many studies comparing BPMN to other model...

Reverse Logistics (RL) groups the activities involved in the return flows of products at the end of their economic life cycle. Enterprises and policy makers all over the world are currently researching, designing and putting in place strategies to recover and recycle products and raw materials, both for the benefit of the environment and to increas...

Enterprise models are created to analyze, document, and communicate the state of an enterprise under multiple perspectives. In addition to being large and complex, the construction of these models presents several difficulties: firstly, they require information provided by sources that might be inaccurate, incomplete, or even obsolete; secondly, al...

Due to the increasing importance of IT technologies in the organizations’ operation, IT related jobs have become highly demanded. That is the case of IT architects, who are responsible for aligning the business needs and motivations with the technology solutions that support company functions. However, the offer of qualified IT architects is not en...

To understand what an organization does one must comprehend the business model, which describes the way in which an organization acquires raw materials, transforms them into a product or service that is delivered to a client, and gains money in exchange. In consequence, it is possible to decompose the model into four core processes: supply, transfo...

As part of Enterprise Architecture projects, models are built using different languages and tools to document and analyze the state of business and IT. However, models are just intermediate assets: deliverables are the actual outputs, but they are typically hand built using information from the models, and following the structures specified in EA m...

As organisations depend more and more on ICT services to meet their missions, ICT disruptions constitute an important risk to their resilience. Therefore, a systematic approach to prevent, predict and manage ICT services disruptions along their life cycle is needed. Simulation and visualisation techniques have been suggested as a means to explore “...

Enterprise Modeling is used to analyze and improve IT, as well as to make IT more suitable to the needs of the business. However, asset intensive organizations have an ample set of operational technologies (OT) that Enterprise Modeling does not account for. When trying to model such enterprises, there is no accurate form of showing components that...

Enterprises have a large amount of Information Technology (IT) elements for supporting their business. Enterprise models represent the state of IT and business elements and the relation between them in a certain moment. However, in some cases it is difficult to build models that accurately represent the enterprise because information may vary fast...

Enterprise models are created for documenting and communicating the structure and state of Business and Information Technologies elements of an enterprise. After models are completed, they are mainly used to support analysis. Model analysis is an activity typically based on human skills and due to the size and complexity of the models, this process...

The business model canvas is a well-known tool used to understand the way in which an organization creates and delivers value. Though it is mostly recognized as a 9 block template with sticky notes, it is much more complex than what it seems. Unfortunately, the static representation of the model has contributed to the loss of its dynamics and the i...

As organizations become more process centered, business process modeling and analysis techniques are becoming critical for decision making. However, most modeling tools have important limitations that make them unsuitable for performing advanced analysis, such as the almost exclusive focus on the control domain. An even more severe limitation is th...

Enterprise Models are the central asset that supports Enterprise Architecture, as they embody enterprise and IT knowledge and decisions. Static analysis over this kind of models is made by inspecting certain properties and patterns, with the goal of gaining understanding and support decision making through evidence. However, this is not a straightf...

When developing Enterprise Models, it is common to aggregate information from several partial models that describe a fragment of the enterprise. This integration is made by connecting elements from different domain models, and is usually a manual task for two reasons: 1) the criteria for connecting pairs of elements is mostly subjective and require...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is being widely used across medium and large companies to document, analyze, plan, and manage the state of business and IT in order to successfully achieve organizational goals described in the enterprise strategy. During EA management projects, enterprise-level models and artifacts such as catalogs, matrices and diagra...

ArchiMate has recently become the standard language for describing and visualizing Enterprise Architecture models encompassing different domains, their relations, and their dependencies. A few approaches have been proposed for the analysis of ArchiMate models, but they are static and thus focus on structural and static features, leaving aside the a...

In model analysis activities, it is critical to make early statements and diagnosis from a high level of abstraction. Currently, these tasks are difficult to perform, and they require both the involvement of experts and the elaboration of specialized artifacts. Furthermore, the complexity of the tasks increases as models become bigger and more deta...

From the point of view of an enterprise architect, the visual analysis of the structure of an Enterprise Model can provide powerful insights and facilitate various analysis tasks. However, analysis methods and visualizations that offer the most valuable results usually depend on the concepts found on the Enterprise Metamodel, and are subjected to a...

Enterprise models are built for representing one enterprise under study. These models require a lot of information, which frequently is not totally available before starting the construction of the model. Modelers create enterprise models based on information provided by different kinds of sources through observations. However, these sources could...

A critical activity in Enterprise Architecture (EA) projects is building models for communicating a consolidated enterprise structure. This is achieved by modeling elements belonging in a plurality of domains (e.g., business, processes, technology, information) and making explicit the relationships existing between them. After models are completed,...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) models are built for representing one enterprise under study and are used for performing analyses that support decision making processes. EA models are created based on information provided by different kinds of sources, but these sources could be insufficient or the information could be incomplete or incorrect regardin...

The linguistic conformance and the ontological conformance between models and metamodels are two different aspects that are frequently mixed. This specically occurs in the EMF framework resulting in problems such as the incapability to load and modify metamodels at runtime. In this paper we present a strategy to solve this problem by separating the...

Enterprise Models for analysis, and especially for automated analysis, should have five characteristics: they have to be accurate representations of the reality; they have to be well structured; they have to be complete with respect to their intended usage; they have to be kept up-to-date; and the cost of their construction and maintenance has to b...

Enterprise Models are the central asset that supports Enterprise Architecture, as they embody enterprise and IT knowledge and decisions. Static analysis over this kind of models is made by inspecting certain properties and patterns, with the goal of gaining understanding and support decision making through evidence. However, this is not a straightf...

Around the world, Enterprise Architecture (EA) practices are been formed in large and medium companies that see in IT either a competitive advantage or a requirement for survival. These EA practices produce models that conceptualize the enterprise, and are commonly used only for communication purposes. Using these models also for analysis purposes...

In Enterprise Architecture (EA) projects, models are built to represent business and Information Technologies (IT) elements, and to abstract the relation between them in one enterprise under study. The construction of EA models depends on information provided by different kinds of sources, but sources could be insficient or information could be inc...

Previous work on control flow, resource, and data patterns have had a fundamental role in delineating the corresponding dimensions of workflow languages and applications. These patterns have been used to evaluate languages' expressiveness, and have defined a basic terminology that is now shared by most workflow developers. Recently, some time patte...

In many domains, models are created based on predefined metamodels which abstract the structure of the domain in question. However, there are specific domains, like Enterprise Architecture (EA) projects, where a metamodel cannot be defined in advance to the creation of the model. Unfortunately, in this situation using standard frameworks, like EMF,...

As domain-specific modeling languages, and especially graphical modeling languages become more and more widespread, so do workbenches for generating editors and tools to use said languages. The advantages of these languages depend heavily on their expressiveness and suitability to communicate stakeholders' concerns; therefore, new languages have to...

The discourse of Enterprise Architecture is based on modeling and performing ‘holistic’ (multi-layer) analyses. However, view centered methodologies offer a partial glimpse of the overall architecture, and current tools do not bring an explicit method of navigating the underlying model. Considering that we need a starting point for analysis and exp...

Simulation is a widely used technique to experiment with the architecture of a complex system without affecting it. Furthermore, it enables observing responses to informational, organizational and environmental changes in order to make analysis over the architecture accordingly. In simulation, experimentation over an IT architecture implies definin...

The linguistic conformance and the ontological conformance between models and metamodels are two different aspects that are frequently mixed. Particularly, this situation occurs in the EMF framework and it has resulted in some well known problems. The most relevant to us is the incapability to load metamodels at runtime, or even to modify the metam...

When metamodels evolve, model conformity may be broken. This forces the owners of the models (modelers) to intervene because it is impossible to automatically discover what to change in order to regain conformity. This paper presents ASIMOV, a platform for model and metamodel co-evolution based on two hypothesis: i) a metamodeler knows the rational...

In Enterprise Architecture (EA) model analysis activities, it is critical to make early statements and diagnosis from a high level of abstraction. Currently, these tasks are difficult to perform, and they require both the involvement of experts and the elaboration of specialized artifacts. Further-more, the complexity of the tasks increases as mode...

Nowadays, novel strategies to develop and adapt workflow engines in efficient ways are required in order to have BPM and workflow solutions with the capacity to support frequent changes in the corporate environment. One key strategy is to build new engines by reusing as much as possible from existing components. This requires two things. Firstly, t...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is a multidimensional model-based approach which enables analysis and decision-making in organizations. Currently, most EA approaches produce inherently static models: they focus on structural qualities of the organizations and represent their state only in one specific point in time. Thus, these models are not suitable...

Metamodel evolution

Cumbia is our platform to develop applications based on multiple, coordinated executable models which can be described using different languages. The coordination of models is achieved by describing how their elements should interact, and mapping those descriptions into low level coordination primitives. Moreover, the description of the coordinatio...

In recent years, workflow enabled applications have been used in an increasing number of contexts. This has required the swift development of new workflow languages and of their corresponding engines. However, the tools available to support the development of these engines are insufficient. In particular, the tools to test the implementation of eng...

Modularizing concerns is a common strategy to lower application complexity: it results in modules that are easy to maintain, to adapt, and to replace. In some cases, these modules can also be expressed with very expressive concern-specific languages that manage high level concepts. On the other hand, modularization also requires tools and languages...

To provide BPM and workflow solutions with the dynamism to support frequent changes in the corporate environment, it is necessary to adopt novel strategies to efficiently develop and adapt workflow engines. One such strategy is to build new engines by reusing as much as possible from existing components. This requires two things: firstly, the mecha...

In model-driven development, high level models are pro-duced in the analysis or design phases, and then they are transformed and refined up to the implementation phase. The output of the last step usually includes executable code because it needs to introduce the de-tails that are required for execution. However, some explicit structural informatio...

An organization’s ability to embrace change, greatly depends on systems that support their operation. Specifically, process engines might facilitate or hinder changes, depending on their flexibility, their extensibility and the changes required: current workflow engine characteristics create difficulties in organizations that need to incorporate so...

Since many workflow applications are used in contexts where the requirements and business rules change frequently, it is necessary to build those applications using strategies and tools that favor adaptation and reuse. The goal of this paper is to show an approach to build these extensible workflow applications using synchronized executable models....

Traditionally, workflow applications use a single language to describe every relevant detail of a business process. Therefore, the complexity of the languages used and their implementations has increased, creating problems related to evolution and maintenance. A possible approach to lower this complexity is to separate the elements of a process acc...

In control-based applications, there is a central coordination element that leads the cooperative execution of several active entities, and provides a way to integrate them to achieve a common goal. Unfortunately, the contexts where control-based applications are used tend to evolve frequently, and they are not always flexible enough to cope with t...