Towards more adequate EIS Contemporary enterprises and their business processes are becoming more dynamic, distributed and complex. Even a simple process (e.g., processing an order) may cause business transactions across boundaries of numerous business units (shipping department, delivery department, sale department, inventory, etc.) and trigger interactions of multiple actors and software applications. This growing complexity and the fact that enterprises by their very nature are social systems, create a series of new challenges. These challenges make the role of the 'Design Science', particularly Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) Design, Software Development and Business Process Design more significant. Among various challenges, the IT-Business Alignment (or misalignment thereof) is a more frequently discussed issue in the current IT literature, which is becoming a paramount concern of system designers and software developers, and, of course, an unbearable burden for enterprise budgets. Although the issue of 'IT-Business Alignment' has drawn considerable attention from researchers aiming to remedy it, the symptoms of misalignment are becoming widespread in enterprises. One recent study by the Standish Group showed that in 2004, only 29% of all IT projects succeeded (delivered on time, on budget, with required features and functions), while 53% are challenged for different reasons including inadequacy (i.e., systems built with a shortfall as regards the required features and functions, thus resulting in an Inadequate EIS) and 18% have failed (cancelled prior to completion or delivered and never used).
Next to the 'IT-Business Alignment', another aspect prevailing in the mainstream IT literature is the significance of improving Business Processes versus investing in more expensive IT solutions. Over the past few decades, businesses were misguided by the belief that IT alone will solve all their corporate woes, and consequently businesses overemphasized the role of IT in gaining a competitive edge while underestimating the importance of a clear understanding and critical analysis of their business processes. However, the tide has turned and the prevailing standpoint in recent publications suggests a much greater focus on process-centric and process-driven enterprises, where, by contrast, IT becomes a 'second class citizen' and business processes and coordination (interaction of people) take the lead. A proponent of this position, Carr [2], argues that "the technology potential for differentiating one company from the pack inexorably declines as IT becomes accessible and affordable to all". Similarly, a pioneer of new revolutionary approaches in computer based Information Systems (IS) Design, Winograd [5], forecasts a tendency in system design where the focus will shift from technical aspects to social aspects (the human side of IT): "In the next 50 years, the increasing importance of designing spaces for human communication and interaction will lead to expansion in those aspects of computing that are focused on people, rather than machinery".
The objective of referring to these few challenges, debates and tendencies (IT-Business Alignment and Process-Driven versus IT-Driven), surrounding the modern Enterprises Research Agenda, is to recognize that certainly modern enterprises are a complex Socio-Technical phenomenon and their study is not solely a technical challenge but rather both a technical and a social challenge. Hence any attempt to align IT with the users' needs would be haunted with failure if the technical and social perspectives were not well balanced. A profound study and research on EIS would require a broader variety of methods and approaches (ranging from Interviews, Observations, Modeling and Simulation to Formal Methods: Model Checking, Process Algebras, Petri Nets) that will allow Validation and Verification of EIS models. To this end, several methods are emerging as promising tools asserting that EIS should not only be technically correct and successful, but also has to deploy best practices, achieve business transformation, and increase quality of work and customer satisfaction. As Dietz [3] concludes, "in order to master the diversity and complexity of contemporary enterprises, theories are needed that separate the stable essence of an enterprise from the variable way in which it is realized and implemented". In his book 'Enterprise Ontology', probably the only