Enterprise Transformation to Enable University–Industry Collaboration: A Case Study in Complexity and Usability

Enterprises need to make continuous fundamental transformations—such as improving current business processes, performing entirely different tasks, and conducting automated business processes—to maintain or gain competitive advantage. These transformations may increase value or decrease time, costs, and uncertainties. However, it is difficult to choose transformations that deserve major investment without assessing the relative value of alternative transformations. Analyzing and redesigning business processes to ensure consistency with business requirements and information technology (IT) specifications is a critical factor for successful enterprise transformation. This paper provides an evolution methodology based on process complexity to implement effective and efficient best practices for enterprise transformation. This paper uses a process complexity and usability metrics, combining software science and cognitive science, to evaluate the cognitive loading of the business processes. Furthermore, to illustrate the metric, this paper describes an IT-driven enterprise transformation to enable university–industry collaboration. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the need for conducting operations with and without the use of information technology. The complexity model shows a more than 60% decrease in the complexity, suggesting that the IT-integrated process is less complex than earlier processes.