AS-IS CONTINUOUS REPRESENTATION

IN ORGANIZATIONAL ENGINEERING

Nuno Castela and José Tribolet

Centro de Engenharia Organizacional, INESC-INOV, Rua Alves Redol, n.9, 8.esq., 1000-029 Lisbon, Portugal

Keywords: Organizational Engineering, Organizational Model, Annotations, UML.

Abstract: If the organizational model was a trustworthy and updated representation of the organizations, in all of its

aspects and perspectives, it could be permanently used as support base to most operational and management

tasks, using all its capacities for capturing, representing and distributing organizational knowledge.

However, the use of this model is normally restricted in time in order to support some organizational

activities, instead of being a solid foundation to support the organizational daily activities acting as an

organizational knowledge repository. This is a result of the difficulty to maintain the model updated and

aligned with the reality. The research in Organizational Engineering is already mature in defining modeling

artefacts, modelling languages and the necessary views to adequate the model to the users, promoting its

usage in a continuous baseline. This paper propose a process to maintain the As-Is Organizational Model

updated. The strategy presented considers the organizational model as a representation of the organizational

conscience, continuously aligned with the reality.

1 INTRODUCTION

Organizational Engineering (OE) put together

concepts, methods and technologies, allowing

understanding, modeling, developing and analyzing

all the aspects of the changing business through the

focus on the relationships and dependencies among

strategy, business processes and the supporting

information (Tribolet, 2005).

The business models (used in OE) allow the

communication, documentation and comprehension

of the organizational activities (Caetano, 2004b).

The as-is business model have the following general

goals (Davemport, 1993), (Hammer, 1993): To be

the starting point for Process Improvement (e.g.

TQM) and Process Innovation (e.g. BPR); Act as

support and documentation of the construction

process of the ISA (Information Systems

Architecture); To be the starting point of the

requirement capture to develop information systems

(Software Engineering); To be a common

knowledge repository of organization.

This last goal could optimize the capacity of

organizations to become Learning Organizations

(Boudreau, 1996), (Magalhães, 2005). This concept

derive from social science and organization

psychology disciplines and, in this scope, is

important to recognize the organizational dynamics

and the interaction contexts among human being

who executes the business processes and creates the

organizational knowledge (Nonaka,1995), (Argyris,

1996).

In order to represent this knowledge, the

organizational models have to be used by people,

thus is necessary to promote the models usability: it

is necessary to know better the interaction dynamics

among several organizational actors – people and

machines. The context concept is the key element in

filtering the relevant information to actors and to

manage the interactions among the organizational

network of actors (Zacarias, 2004). It is also

necessary to define the model perspectives which

promote integrated, shared and abstract views of the

several realities and, at the same time, respect the

specific needs of each particular actor and context,

contributing to capturing both individual and group

knowledge of organizations.

In the next section some of the contributions to

this work are described. Then, the characteristics the

model should have to be continuously updated and

the continuous organizational model updating

process are defined, using the CEO Framework.

371

Castela N. and Tribolet J. (2008).

AS-IS CONTINUOUS REPRESENTATION IN ORGANIZATIONAL ENGINEERING.

In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems - ISAS, pages 371-374

DOI: 10.5220/0001725403710374

 SciTePress

2 CONTRIBUTIONS

2.1 Organizational Knowledge

The organizational knowledge theory is supported

by the individual interpersonal and group

relationships and depends of the facilitation contexts

(Magalhães, 2005). The organizational creation

theory says that the knowledge creation is a

continuous process of socialization, externalization,

combination and internalization. Nonaka and

Takeuchi apply the hypertext metaphor to the

organizations based in the analogy of the

organizational structure of the web sites

(hierarchical but navigable). The hypertext

organization facilitates the horizontal work without

loose the hierarchical formal structure. This

organization has three layers or contexts: business

system, project team and knowledge (Nonaka,

1995).

The learning process evolves errors detection and

correction (Smith, 2005). When, within

organizations, something goes wrong, the

deployment of an alternative strategy which allows

working under the same governing variables is a

way to continue working. Given or chosen the goals,

plans and rules, the action is set to run and is not

questioned. This is the single loop learning. Another

way of see this question is though questioning the

governing variables submitting it to some critical

scrutiny. This is an example of double loop learning.

This kind of learning could lead to change the

governing variables, and then, to a change in

strategy and its consequences (Smith, 2005).

2.2 CEO Framework

The CEO Framework has four modeling basic

primitives (Matos, 2007): Entity - used to model

things or concepts important to the universe of

organizational modeling. It can be a resource (an

informational entity, a material entity, a human

resource, an organizational unit, a goal, etc.). The

entities are numerable, identifiable and are denoted

through substantives; Activity - used to model

actions in organizational work context. Are

denotable trough verbs; Role – is the modeling

mechanism that allows concern separation through a

property set representation and the particular

behaviour of an entity when in a particular

collaboration (Caetano, 2004), (Caetano, 2005);

Context - is a business object network characterized

by a set of state variables associated with the

individual elements of the network and with the

emergent properties of the network (Zacarias, 2006).

These primitive are used to model several

perspectives of the enterprise architecture, each one

has a set of diagrams (Sousa, 2005). In each

diagram, different point of views can be defined.

One of the goals of enterprise architecture is the

maintenance of the alignment among architectures

(perspectives) despite its independency.

2.3 Annotations

The use of annotations is based in the work of

Becker-Kornstaedt e Roman Reinert who applied

this mechanism to capture the reasons to the changes

usually made to software projects based on the

implicit knowledge of the developing team members

(Becker-Kornstaedt, 2002).

To adapt this concept, the idea of Gregory

Mentzas, who enunciates the process called Human

Quality Control as a way to achieve the total quality

of the work executed in organizations, was used

(Mentzas, 1999).

3 THE AS-IS REPRESENTATION

The organizational model is used as a common and

shared knowledge repository of the organization,

allowing:

 To increase the knowledge of what each one is

doing as a part of the whole organization (the

points of view are important in the modeling

process).

 To facilitate the communication by allowing to

focus the right point of view.

 To turn explicit the whole organization.

 To clarify who are the actors in the processes

trough the identification of the client/supplier

relationship, the identification of who and

what is contributing with what for the process

and the clarification of what internal and

external factors influence the process.

The presentation of business information has to be

synchronized with the context and needs of the users

of the organizational model (EMIPA-SIG, 1992).

The model should formulate and answer relevant

questions associated to the several operations of the

organizations. The results should supply feedback in

order to execute new iterations. Considering the

model as source for decision support, it should

include the access to previous decisions, the current

state of whole organization and simulation capacities

of current decisions.

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It seems that beyond of the organizational model

traditional function related with the support of

organizational activities isolated in time (that makes

its existence short) the organizational model have a

facilitator function in collecting and sharing

organizational knowledge, making itself an essential

tool to deploy learning organizations.

4 THE DYNAMIC

ORGANIZATIONAL MODEL

MANAGEMENT PROCESS

The dynamic organizational model management

process aims to reduce the misalignment between

the distributed model and the reality.

This process, which includes activities like

observation, analysis and control, should be

executed by people (agents or organizational actors)

who execute also the business activities of the

operational processes in the organizations.

The annotations are the mechanisms which can be

used as a tool to manage this process.

The annotations are used to make proposals to

correct the presented model (corrective

maintenance), capture changes to the action or

interaction contexts (adaptive maintenance), make

free comments which could anticipate problems

(preventive maintenance) and promote continuous

improvement process (perfective maintenance).

In 1.4.2 UML specification (ISO/IEC 19501

standard), an annotation is used to express a

comment and should be attached to a modeling

element or a set of modeling elements. It does not

have semantic strength, but it could have useful

information for the modeler (UML ISO/IEC, 2005).

It has a unique attribute, a character string which

forms the annotation body, and is linked to the

element or elements trough an association and it

could have two basic stereotypes: <<requirement>>

and <<responsibility>>.

At the individual execution level, the actors must

have an available view or perspective that relates

their own business object (entity) with the activities

that they execute (which belongs to organizational

processes) and with the entities manipulated

(informational, material, IS/IT’s).

Not all the actors have to make this analysis,

because control points can be defined in processes

with the right granularity adjusted to the model.

In the context of the dynamic organizational model

management, the annotations can be of three types:

individual, group or organizational. The

organizational annotation can be divided in two

subtypes, process annotation and functional

annotation.

 Individual annotation (figure 1);

 Group annotation (figure 1);

 Organizational Annotation (figure 2):

– Process annotation;

– Functional annotation.

These three types implement three cycles which

represent the three layers vision of hypertext

organization (Nonaka, 1995) and present an

extension to the double cycle learning (Smith, 2005),

adding the intermediary cycle of group interaction

context.

The first cycle handles the observation and

analysis of the individual task executed by the

individual actors of the organization in the action

context, and has the individual annotation as output.

The second cycle handles the observation and

analysis of the tasks executed by more than one

actor in the interaction context (group work or

orchestration work in a business process). This

cycle’s output is the group annotation.

The third cycle starts with the vision of the two

predecessor cycles, aligning them with the

functional dimension (of organizational units) and

the process dimension (of business processes).

Figure 1: Activities for model updating (1st and 2nd cycle). Figure 2: Activities for model updating (3rd cycle).

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373

In the functional dimension, the individual and

group cycles are projected adding the functional

annotation by the owners of the organizational units

where the activities are executed. In the process

dimension the individual and group cycles are

projected adding the process annotation by the

owners of the organizational units where the

activities are executed. The figure 3 shows a

representation of the general process, where the

output of the organizational model dynamic

management process – the annotation, are then

considered as an input to the redesign model

process.

Figure 3: Model updating process.

5 CONCLUSIONS

This work is based in the idea that the dynamic

updating of the organizational model could bring

strategic advantages to the organizations. Thus it

was presented a first step to defend and deploy the

dynamic maintenance of an organizational model.

This maintenance is based in the defined

mechanism: the annotation.

This mechanism is the output of several activities

executed in the various layers of the model, which

allows the redesign of the as-is model, promoting its

alignment with the reality.

A prototype tool is allready being created to

support this Model Updating Process in a

governamental agency in Portugal.

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