An action design research approach within enterprise engineering

Abstract

Enterprise engineering (EE) is emerging as a new discipline that is multi-disciplinary in nature. As highlighted by researchers within the EE discipline, the current status of EE endeavours as taken by several universities is unclear, which led to several initiatives and publications to develop a research agenda within the enterprise engineering research community. This article builds upon existing work aimed at establishing EE as a discipline, also accepting the epistemological stance of idealism, pragmatism and existential phenomenology as argued by Hoogervorst as an appropriate stance for EE research, prior to suggesting action design research (ADR) as an appropriate research method for EE research. More so, the article presents an Action Design Research within Enterprise Engineering (ADR-in-EE) approach as the main contribution to guide prospective EE researchers towards research within the EE discipline. The ADR-in-EE approach is based on ADR, but provides additional guidance by incorporating the use of an Enterprise Evolution Contextualisation Model (EECM), as well as creativity facilitation in the form of Univation’s brainstorming method. As a second contribution, we experiment with the ADR-in-EE approach and use a survey to extract feedback on the usefulness of the approach. The research findings are mostly positive, with qualitative feedback on further improving ADR-in-EE approach.