The author published “Enterprise Ontology”, a translation of “Enterprise Ontology (2020, Springer)” by Maruzen Publishing at the end of 2011. Enterprise Ontology is the main pillar of enterprise engineering, a new specialized field that combines management and organizational science with ICT science. The proponent of enterprise engineering is the Dutchman Dr. Jan L. G. Dietz, who has worked with European experts in management, computer science, and ICT engineering to establish it. He is one of the heirs to the tradition of Dutchman Edsger Dijkstra, who advocated structured programming.

Ontology means “knowing what elements ‘things’ are made of, how those elements relate to each other, and how ‘things’ change.” In other words, it leads to knowing the essence of the existence of ‘things’. Enterprise ontology is the application of this idea to companies.
This book recognizes that “current enterprise information systems (EIS) are built without a coherent and consistent theoretical insight into the components of the corporate organizations that use them, and users are at the mercy of various ideas and feelings based on experience. As a result, organizational management using EIS falls into management confusion due to a lack of common understanding among stakeholders, unclear responsibility, and increased maintenance costs.” Based on a human-centered paradigm and a theory that brings together the wisdom of experts in various fields, this book anatomically uncovers the essence of the existence of corporate organizations and shows that EIS is not simply a part of an automated organization, but plays an important role in supporting the organization’s structure and functions.

During my many years of work in the business of corporate information and communication systems, I have had doubts about the opacity of the structural relationship between organizational management and EIS. I translated this book in the hope that the original author’s thoughts on resolving this doubt will be known to Japanese managers and ICT engineers.
In addition, while the structure and functions of an organization are generally expressed in various documents, the true nature of the organization cannot be understood at first glance; it is, so to speak, “the part hidden by the representation.” This book proposes DEMO (Design and Engineering Methodology for Organisation) as a methodology to remove the veil and explicitly implement the true nature of the organization. In other words, it supports not only theory but also practice. As I will make clear in the next article, please note that there is a strong affinity between DX, which uses ICT to transform the true nature of corporate management, and the ideas in this book.