David Aveiro

The discipline of enterprise engineering

A century ago, Taylor published a landmark in the organisational sciences: his Principles of Scientific Management. Many researchers have elaborated on Taylor’s principles, or have been influenced otherwise. The authors of the current paper evaluate a century of enterprise development, and conclude that a paradigm shift is needed for dealing adequately with the challenges that modern enterprises face. Three generic goals are identified. The first one, intellectual manageability, is the basis for mastering complexity; current approaches fall short in assisting professionals to master the complexity of enterprises and enterprise changes. The second goal, organisational concinnity, is conditional for making strategic initiatives operational; current approaches do not, or inadequately, address this objective. The third goal, social devotion, is the basis for achieving employee empowerment as well as knowledgeable management and governance; modern employees are highly educated knowledge workers; yet, the mindset of managers has not evolved accordingly. The emerging discipline of Enterprise Engineering, as conceived by the authors, is considered to be a suitable vehicle for achieving these goals. It does so by providing new, powerful theories and effective methodologies. A theoretical framework is presented for positioning the theories, goals, and fundamentals of enterprise engineering in four classes: philosophical, ontological, ideological and technological.

Towards Objective Business Modeling in Enterprise Engineering - Defining Function, Value and Purpose

Current Enterprise Engineering state of the art does not fully address concerns such as bootstrapping and reengineering a working organization from the business perspective. It is currently focused on ontology, the constructional vision, rather than the function. We argue that the function design deserves no less modeling effort, as the construction design draws upon it. To this aim, a change of approach is necessary. By combining knowledge from DEMO, Service Science and e3Value, this paper presents conceptual contributions towards modeling the contribution perspective of a system in an integrated way, namely by defining Function, Value and Purpose. These concepts are first defined in the context of a dual party relationship and then applied to chains of two or more elements. By coupling with an innovative application of the Generic System Development Process, an extension of existing Enterprise Engineering theory is proposed, in a way we believe will assist in improve its current state of the art and widen its application scope.

Organizational Configuration Actor Role Modeling Using DEMO

A certain state of an organization, in its strategic, tactical and operational components results from a combination of elements that makes it a very complex entity. Its components should co-exist in a dynamic and constant balance, whose configuration must have flexible and adaptable reaction mechanisms. As processes increase in complexity, it becomes more difficult to manage an organization, almost in real time, in its many dimensions and configurations. It is therefore essential to identify, given its current complexity, how to guarantee holistic organizational adaptation, agent roles in configuration change and, also, how to design, organize and manage an organization, in the resource domain, considering: i) multiple restrictions; ii) critical needs of real time; iii) various configurations. Using design and action research, our work proposes the concept of organizational configuration, which is managed by the governance sub-system. Based on a macrogenesis capability it allows the creatiion and adaptation of transversal transformation mechanisms that, harnessing complexity, are able to maintain the necessary balance to guarantee viability and performance.

Value-Oriented Solution Development Process: Uncovering the Rationale behind Organization Components

Although significant progresses have been made in recent years regarding the goals of Enterprise Engineering, we find that the rationale behind every component of an organization is still not systematically and clearly specified. Indeed, state of the art approaches to enterprise development processes do not explicitly incorporate an essential dimension of analysis: value. This state of affairs does not warrant a leading role in enterprise alignment.

Business Service Definition in Enterprise Engineering - A Value-oriented Approach

Enterprise Engineering is a means of applying engineering method to Enterprise Architecture, developing and evolving the mapping enterprise strategy to its resources. The potential benefits of service orientation have long been considered a driver for Enterprise Engineering. However, the service development discipline as a whole is still in it early stages. Do-main-specific frameworks and methodologies exist but none effectively deals with the teleological aspects of services, generally dismissed as subjective matter. In this paper, we analyze relevant state of the art in the areas of General Systems Theory, Service Science, Enterprise Engineering, Value Modeling, Enterprise Architecture and Business Modeling. The main shortcomings identified essentially reside in the lack of capability to model the purpose of a given service system in a structured way to guide current and future development efforts, which also implies having flexibly dealing with relativity of enterprise frontier definition. To address these issues, our research is focused on modeling different perspectives of enterprises as service systems, along three perspectives, namely construction, function and contribution. The approach presented in this paper involves 1) distinguishing the three mentioned perspectives and 2) articulating the concepts of each perspective so that an end-to-end, integrated, model is provided. The most distinguishing feature is using the concept of value proposal of a system to express the motivation that drives its development. We propose to follow an engineering approach that is grounded on social actor communication theory, taking into account the social meaning of service provisioning and consumption. Moreover, the mapping of this model to the elements that compose a system should be supported by design. To this end, both e3Value, from Value Modeling, and DEMO, from Enterprise Engineering, are considered and their integration is described.

Towards a G.O.D. Organization for Organizational Self-Awareness

In this paper we draw on concepts from the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations, and also from its theoretical foundations, to discuss our notions of Organizational Self-Awareness and ontological meta model. These are deemed as central notions to understand and present, in a clear and precise manner, solutions for our main research purpose: finding concepts and methods to better handle organizational change caused by unexpected exceptions causing dysfunction in an organization’s activity. Based on ontological notions like state base of a world and the ontological parallelogram, we arrive at precise definitions of what we call organizational self and its awareness. These then serve to put in perspective our proposal for the G.O.D Organization, considered to exist in every organization and being responsible for the Generation, Operationalization and Discontinuation of organization artifacts – e.g., actor role pizza deliverer – reflecting change of the organizational self. The main contribution of this paper is a discussion and clarification of how one can perceive an organization in a precise and thorough way, as to be able to keep a fact record of its relevant changes and, as a consequence, have a dynamic and “living model” of the organization.

Extending the design and engineering methodology for organizations with the generation operationalization and discontinuation organization

We propose an extension for the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations – DEMO – to support organization and model change dynamics: the ontological model of the generic G.O.D organization, considered to exist in every organization and being responsible for the Generation, Operationalization and Discontinuation of organization artifacts – e.g., actor role pizza deliverer – as a consequence of the process of handling unexpected exceptions causing dysfunctions in the organizations activity The G.O.D organization keeps a thorough trace of all acts regarding the diagnosis of problems (dysfunctions) and the design and operationalization of their respective solutions Such an historical trace provides useful information to each organizational engineering process (OEP) handling unexpected exceptions Another benefit is to provide a base for a constantly updated model of organizational reality, useful to guide the general activity of organization agents and to provide up to date information of current organizational reality to each OEP.

The Role of Value-Oriented IT Demand Management on Business/IT Alignment: The Case of ZON Multimedia

More than ever, enterprises aim at assuring their structure and initiative portfolio are aligned and support value-creation. However, essential, explicit and cross-cutting models that allow keeping bottom-line in sight over the whole initiative lifecycle are generally absent.

Linking Value Chains – Combining e3Value and DEMO for Specifying Value Networks

In this paper we provide a model for the bonding of systems in a value network. Our main contributions are: 1) a structural model of the chains and their viewpoints, and 2) a specification of how to use that structure within a process that supports the formalization of the rationale behind system development decisions. To provide a solution to this challenge we combine System Development and Value Modeling disciplines. From DEMO, we use the Generic System Development Process from the Tao-theory and its Value-oriented System Development Process implementation. We formalize basic concepts from e3Value, namely start stimulus, end stimulus, gates and scenario paths in an integrated way with system construction models. We provide a methodology for constructing e3Value models systematically and improve DEMO modeling by devising individual value networks in an adequate way and how different system components combine to form them.

Control Organization: A DEMO Based Specification and Extension

In this paper we apply the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO), to specify an ontological model for the generic Control Organization that we argue that exists in every organization. With our proposal, DEMO is extended so that we can specify critical properties of an organization – that we call measures – whose value must respect certain restrictions imposed by other properties of the organization – that we call viability norms. We can now also precisely specify defined resilience strategies that control and eliminate dysfunctions – violations of viability norms caused byexceptions. On top of this, we can also keep a systematic trace of the history of dysfunctions of an organization and of control acts executed to eliminate them. All of these facts are structured in a systematic manner and provided in a set of proposed tables, which are useful for a variety of purposes like (1) making control responsibilities clear and making organization agents accountable for bad control decisions, as well as (2) allowing more informed organization change decisions.