A Multilevel Model of Events in Support of Enterprise Agility in the Realm of Enterprise Modeling

One of the challenges faced by enterprises is a need to be agile, i.e., having the ability to detect changes and respond to them efficiently and effectively. These changes are caused by 'change drivers', i.e., events occurring within an enterprise itself or within its environment. Many scholars argue that the use of conceptual modeling in general, and enterprise modeling in particular, may help achieve and sustain enterprise agility. This, however, requires enterprise modeling approaches not only to provide an integrated view on the enterprise action system and information system, but also to account for events indicating business-impacting situations and information on their impact on the enterprise. In addition, being agile requires the ability to acquire information from event sources (sensing), to process obtained information, and to support a decision-making process (response). In this paper, we argue that the fulfillment of those postulates demands the application of an alternative language paradigm, namely multilevel modeling. Therefore, we contribute a multilevel model of events developed using an integrated modeling and programming approach.