EKD - enterprise knowledge development

EKD - enterprise knowledge development - is a recent modelling methodology for analysing, understanding and documenting the components of a an organisation. This methodology aims at narrowing ties between IT and business processes and creating a common knowledge repository, ultimately serving as a tool for effective knowledge management. Applying EKD enables a wider understanding of all the areas in a company, including the social, organisational, technical and economic aspects that come into play when establishing a plan for requirements engineering.

EKD seeks to address some issues such as:

- business plan strategies;
- analysis and definition of business rules;
- business process re-engineering;
- common understanding of how a business works to support problem solving;

EKD also uses sub-models to explore business components in depth so as to offer a breakdown of the company's current standing and how it can lead to meaningful changes that will create more value to the business:

1- objective Model: Describes what the company needs to attain and avoid. This models seeks to establish priorities and how the objectives relate to problems, threats and opportunities part of the company's reality.

2- business rule model: enacts business rules, which depends on what was established in the objectives model.

3- business process model: sets the organisational processes and the interactions involved among them.

4- concept model: defines the entities and they relate to the business flows.

5- actors and resources model: defines teh actors and resources in the business processes, depicting the relationships therein. They can be people, organisational units and functions.

6- requirements and technical component model: describes the information system to support the business activities.