There is a more and more common understanding, that not the ownership of information technology resources but their management is the foundation for sustainable competitive advantage [1]. According to Ross et al. [2], smart companies define how they (will) do business (using an operating model) and design the processes and infrastructure critical to their current and future operations (enterprise architecture), which guide the evolution of their foundation for execution. More and more companies would like their existing technology to enable their future capabilities. In [2] this capability to exploit the foundation, embedding new initiatives to make it stronger and using it as competitive weapon to develop new business opportunities is estimated as 5% of companies.

Enterprise engineering is the application of engineering principles to the design, restructuring and operation of enterprises and their cooperation with other enterprises. It has the task to derive an Enterprise Architecture from the enterprise goals and strategy and align it with the enterprise resources as shown in figure 1. Enterprise architecture [2], [3], aims (i) to understand the interactions and all kind of articulations between business and information technology, (ii) to define how to align business components and IT components, as well as business strategy and IT strategy, and more particularly (iii) to develop and support a common understanding and sharing of those purposes of interest. As shown in figure 1, enterprise architecture is used to map the enterprise goal and strategy to the enterprise’s resources (actors, assets, IT supports) and to take into account the evolution of this mapping. Enterprise architecture provides also documentation on the assignment of enterprise resources to the enterprise goals and strategy. To this end, advantageous patterns (best practices) can be reused and alternative design solutions can be compared. Furthermore, enterprise architecture may be checked for compliance with laws, regulatory rules etc. Enterprise architecture facilitates also to evaluate the performance and efficiency of the resources used.

Service is the most important paradigm for the organisation of enterprises and the cooperation with other enterprises in order to achieve competitive advantage. Therefore it does not surprise, that leading enterprises in the U.S. derive more than 50% of their revenues from services [4]. Through services, enterprises stabilize their revenues [5]. This applies not only to pure services such as transportation but also for material products that are augmented by services such as maintenance, consulting and training. By exchanging services within partnerships, enterprises are able to combine their competences and thus provide solutions to the customer not possible for the single enterprise. In this context the use of services is especially advantageous, because it allows clearly describing the contributions of each participating enterprise. Furthermore, due to the technical advancements, e.g. Software as a Service, Cloud Computing and Service-Oriented-Architectures for information systems (SOA), enterprises are able to apply service-orientation to new areas.

Figure 1: Service-oriented Enterprise Engineering

Service-oriented enterprise engineering further develops the enterprise engineering approach selecting service as governing paradigm. The enterprise goals and strategies are mapped to a service-oriented enterprise architecture, as shown in Figure 2.