SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIC BUSINESS ENGINEERING, whether a reactive effort to gain competitive advantage or a proactive effort to maintain and improve performance, depends on an organization's ability to accurately and methodically analyze its internal and external environments, people, processes, organizational structure, information uses, and technology. Enterprise modeling (EM) greatly enhances strategic business engineering by providing a structured, diagrammatic framework for depicting the

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... interconnected and changing components addressed in large-scale change. Its representative models of the organization serve as baseline against which all subsequent change is measured and provide a basis for strategic planning. Using EM as a forecasting tool fosters a more effective and efficient planning process that dramatically increases the probabilities of success. IS professionals are uniquely situated to apply enterprise modeling technology to overall business change. Enterprise modeling originated in data processing departments as a software development tool and plays a critical role in computeraided systems engineering, allowing systems designers to map current and proposed information systems as a predecessor to development. IS professionals have direct access to the organizational information and the discipline necessary to support information flow. It is, therefore, a logical extension for the IS function to aid business engineering strategists achieve the revisions inherent in strategic business engineering. ENTERPRISE MODELING Enterprise modeling has been described by E. Aranow as "a combination of diagrammatic, tabular, or other visual structures, which represent the key components of the business that need to be understood." More simply put, enterprise modeling consists of representing complex objects in easy-tounderstanding diagram. Complex modeling tools facilitate EM, but the basis for understanding a large, complex organization relates to the ability