Marielba Silva de Zacarias,

D – Departamento de Engenharia Informática, Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa –

Abstract:

Organizational Modeling has been used both for Management and Engineering ends. As an engineering tool, Business Process Modeling has been extremely useful in improving the efficiency of organizations. Nevertheless, it does not provide all the answers to the operational problems of the organization. Current business process oriented tools do not work as well for non-structured processes because they assign tasks in a mechanistic, machine-oriented, way. This is an important issue because many business processes are fairly static only at a high level. At lower levels -at the activity or task level- they tend to be more agile. Business process models are also not capable of capturing the multitasking dynamics of people at work. Task-switching implies less time to obtain the information required by tasks and knowledge about when tasks are actually being executed. This entails not only personalized and fast, but also timely information provision mechanisms.

An organization must be viewed from several perspectives or views if it is to be fully described and understood. The goal of the present research is to propose an organizational perspective capable of describing the actual execution of the various business activities, focusing on its actors and on the multitasking capabilities of its performers. The proposed model is to be used for engineering ends. The main expected contributions of this model are: (1) serve as a visualization tool of the state of the different tasks being performed by each actor and the rules that govern actions and interactions among actors within activities, (2) facilitate a task-based support of ad-hoc environments created by agile process execution and (3) provide a bottom-up approach for the reification of business concepts such as actors, tasks, and organizational units, to establish links with other organizational views and enable ‘consistency checks’ between actual execution and these other views.

 

Date: 2005-Nov-03     Time: 11:00:00     Room: INESC- 9º PISO Auditório Alfa

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