Requirements elicitation is one of the most important phases in the design process and applied by many engineering disciplines. A more recent application of the design process is to design the enterprise as an artefact, also called enterprise engineering (EE). Even though there are limits to formal enterprise design due to enterprise complexity, strategic intentions are not realised spontaneously or accidently. Intentional enterprise design is required, starting with the strategic context, eliciting enterprise intentions. Similar to the ad hoc evolution of enterprises, EE as a discipline also developed in a fragmented way with enterprise design knowledge mostly encapsulated in several enterprise design approaches. A previous study analysed eight different enterprise design/alignment approaches, inductively developing a common framework to represent and compare these approaches in terms of four main components. One of the components represents the scope of enterprise design/alignment in terms of three dimensions: design domains, intentions and constraints, and enterprise scope. Since existing approaches use inconsistent means of defining the first dimension, namely the design domains, previous work already provides some guidance on demarcating design domains in a more consistent way. This article focuses on the second dimension, i.e. intentions and constraints, and the need to distinguish between different intention-related concepts to reduce possible ambiguity. The study applies design science research to develop a method for enterprise intentions concept clarification (MEICC) as a theoretical contribution. The study also offers a practical contribution, demonstrating how the MEICC was used to clarify intention-related concepts that feature within a specific approach, namely Hoogervorst’s approach. A coding strategy (including coding conditions, a refined codebook and a coding method), developed for Hoogervorst’s approach via MEICC, is presented as a secondary contribution, since the coding strategy will also be useful to practitioners that use Hoogervorst’s approach.

中文翻译：

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减少企业设计过程中的歧义

需求获取是设计过程中最重要的阶段之一，被许多工程学科应用。设计过程的最新应用是将企业设计为人工制品，也称为企业工程 (EE)。尽管由于企业复杂性对正式的企业设计有限制，但战略意图并不是自发或偶然实现的。需要有意图的企业设计，从战略背景开始，引出企业意图。与企业的临时演进类似，EE 作为一门学科也以支离破碎的方式发展，企业设计知识主要封装在几种企业设计方法中。之前的一项研究分析了八种不同的企业设计/调整方法，归纳开发一个通用框架来表示和比较这些方法的四个主要组成部分。其中一个组件从三个维度表示企业设计/调整的范围：设计领域、意图和约束以及企业范围。由于现有方法使用不一致的方法来定义第一个维度，即设计域，以前的工作已经提供了一些以更一致的方式划分设计域的指导。本文重点讨论第二个维度，即意图和约束，需要区分不同的意图相关概念以减少可能的歧义。该研究应用设计科学研究来开发企业意图概念澄清（MEICC）方法作为理论贡献。该研究还提供了实际贡献，展示了如何使用 MEICC 来阐明特定方法（即 Hoogervorst 方法）中与意图相关的概念。通过 MEICC 为 Hoogervorst 方法开发的编码策略（包括编码条件、改进的码本和编码方法）作为次要贡献呈现，因为编码策略对使用 Hoogervorst 方法的从业者也很有用。