Note: The course is aimed at MSc and PhD students who can enroll themselves. However, BSc students in the last year could also be enrolled; please, contact course organizers in this case.
Formal course description
A formal course description that includes the objective, learning goals, etc. are available online in the following Web pages:
Tools: Moodle, Zoom
On-line meetings with the teachers:
Dates: TBD, preliminary each second Friday (if not a holiday): 10 Feb, 17 Feb, 10 Mar, 24 Mar, 31 Mar, 21 Apr, 5 May, 19 May
Time: TBD, preliminary 10:00-14:00, there will be a break for lunch in the middle
Informal course description
In difference from other modeling courses, this course is not directed at modeling a specific active or passive object, e.g. an ICT system, or a specific phenomenon, e.g. a business processes, instead it is directed at revealing interconnections between different objects (passive and active) and phenomena to show how they interact to make an enterprise or any other organization function as a whole. The course is aimed for a diverse audience from different MSc programs such as Software Engineering, Conversion Master's Program in IT, Innovation and Technology Management, etc. The aim for students attending may depend on the program. The technically minded students may need to make a connection from their technical work to the rest of the enterprise/organizational functioning, while the business minded students may want to see how technology can help in implementing strategy and radical innovation.
This is a totally on-line course given on the master level. It presumes the students working on their own while reading materials, studying video materials and completing project assignments under the guidance of the teachers. There will be online meetings with the teachers each second week. To make the most from these meetings we use the ideas borrowed from the concept of flipped classroom. This means that the students are supposed to study the materials related to the topic before coming to the meeting bringing a lot of questions to the meeting. It does not matter if you fail to grasp all material via individual study. The main thing is to have a good try to understand the material that might be conceptually difficult for some. Here, we follow another pedagogical principle – Learning by Failing (LbF), which means the deepest level of knowledge is obtained through trying and failing before doing it right.
There are quite a few enterprise modeling techniques and language, each with its own area of application. To show this diversity in a short course, we have chosen three quite different modeling techniques for studying, namely: ArchiMate, Viable System Model (VSM) and Fractal Enterprise Model (FEM).
Though much of the teaching material for the course consists of articles from academic publishers, the course is in no way a theoretical one. The main learning objective of the course is to obtain knowledge that can be deployed in practice. This objective is to be achieved via a course project of building various models related to the same enterprise called Harmony Inside. This is a fictional enterprise, which, however, has a real-life prototype – a small Swedish company founded by two entrepreneurs. What is more, there is no textual description of the company. We use yet one more pedagogical idea called Apprenticeship Simulation (AS). The enterprise is described via a diverse set of multimedia resources, like interviews and web-based sources from which the students need to extract the information for building their models. Though the interviews have been conducted for an educational purpose, these are real interviews with real people with questions similar to the ones that would be posed in a real consulting practice. The same can be said about web-based resources, some of them are real, others are fictional, but they reflect the real sites.
The examination in the course consists of two parts – one part is the project completed in groups, and the second part is an individual exam assignment for everybody to be completed at designated date and time. The assignment will be of the same type as a project, you will be given a business description and you will be building three different models from it. However, the description will be textual, not as a set of multimedia sources. We believe that the students who worked in full on the project assignments find no difficulty to complete the exam assignments.
The knowledge obtained in the course could be useful in completing a MSc thesis project, especially if you want to have a topic connected to your current or future workplace.