Enterprise models of measurement: A comparison of existing models used for quality management and e-business

To bring benefits of e-business to bear for knowledge intensive quality management business processes, ‘quality’ must be modeled within the enterprise model used for e-business. Fundamental to modeling quality is measurement; quality cannot be assessed until it is first measured. In this paper, enterprise models of measurement are surveyed, with emphasis on those used for enterprise resource planning and business-to-business software. A key survey finding is that there are limitations in sharing enterprise models between organizations, because semantics of models' terms are not formally defined. Rather than have a computational enterprise model automatically deduce meanings of terms based upon represented definitions, users are often left to interpret meanings external to the model. As well, measurement models tend to be small implicit partial models of a quality module. These findings motivate the need for a more exhaustive and formal model, in an ontology of measurement.