AS IS ORGANIZATIONAL MODELING

The problem of its dynamic management

Nuno Castela

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

José Tribolet

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

eywords: As-Is Business Model, As-Is Dynamic Management, Exceptions, UML

Abstract: In nowadays business competitive world, the organizations need to have some integrated and accurate

representation of its business processes and information systems to allow fast responses to activities like

business process reengineering, information systems requirements capture and quality systems

implementation, etc. The frequency and importance of this kind of activities is rising up. Unfortunately, the

maintenance of this representation is not a trivial question and the business model tends to be constructed to

be used and then “sit on the shelf”. In this paper, first is shown why frequently the As-Is model “sit on the

shelf”. Then, is shown who the “clients” of the As-Is model are, and how these organizational actors can

contribute to maintain the As-Is model updated. In the end preliminary characteristics of a model are

identified in order to became it self-sustainable. A meta-model of the As-Is model and a prototype tool are

also presented.

1 INTRODUCTION

Integrating the CEO framework for organizational

modeling with UML, developed at INESC-INOV

[Vasconcelos et al, 2001], the intention is to define

what characteristics the As-Is model must have to be

auto-sustainable and updated all over the time.

Despite the recognition of the added value of the

business models, its potential is not being

completely explored. The business models are

typically used for BPR that intend to [Castela et al,

2001]: collect requirements for information systems

development, improve the business key mechanisms

comprehension and identify new business

opportunities.

These activities have a common characteristic –

they act normally isolated in time. However, these

activities are augmenting its frequency because the

organizations are becoming more and more dynamic

in order to maintain its competitiveness. This fact,

and the need of process continuous improvements

imposed by the quality management systems

implementation, leads to the necessity of having a

integrated model of strategy – business – SI

actualized over the time.

The process of building the As-Is model and its

justification are well documented by the enterprise

and scientific community: [Reijswoud-Rijst, 1995],

[Gruninger et al., 1996], [Bhaskar et al., 1994],

[Podolsky, 1998], [Giaglis et al., 1999].

Despite the added value recognition of the

organizational modeling, the maintenance of the As-

Is business/strategic/IS models has been hard, as we

can see by the analysis of the following questions

still without answer [EMIPA-SIG, 1992]: Why

business models are archived so frequently after its

initial use? Why business models are not up dated?

How enterprises can or should better capitalize the

business models?

It is necessary to close the gap between the

modeling languages and the business actors, because

they are an active part in the use, updating and

management of the organizational model.

It is useful to promote the confidence and

eliminate the hard comprehension of the business

models by the business actors. To make an auto-

sustainable model it is necessary distribute it and

make it usable.

561

Castela N. and Tribolet J. (2004).

AS IS ORGANIZATIONAL MODELING - The problem of its dynamic management.

In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 561-564

DOI: 10.5220/0002646505610564

 SciTePress

2 THE UPDATE PROBLEM

The business models should formulate and answer to

relevant questions about the organizations tasks.

Considering the model as a source for decision

support, the model necessary information includes:

access to previous representations and current state

of whole organization so that the model be just more

then a static document.

The following questions are published in the

document “A state-of-the-art analysis by the Special

Interest Group (SIG) on Enterprise Modeling:

Issues, Problems, and Approaches” published in

1992 [EMIPA-SIG, 1992]. The questions presented

in this conference are very actual, even 10 years

later, which reveals the necessity of knowing if the

nowadays technologies can better answer to these

questions.

Question 1: Why the models sit on the shelf so

frequently after its initial use?

The answers to this question refer the difficulties

about the comprehension of the models by the

business people, the inadequate paper support, the

lack of demonstration about the usefulness of the

models in the management and planning areas. The

problems of the language and notation used and

presentation and detail emphasis were also

mentioned. It was referred that perhaps the

management question was beyond the borders and

views of the model.

All the answers have a point in common because

all refer that the presentation of the model have to be

synchronized with the context and the necessities of

the users [EMIPA-SIG, 1992].

Thus, is necessary to link the modeling

languages with the needs of the business actors. It

should be created the necessary views to support the

use of the model despite the views that some

methodologies impose. It’s necessary to prevent the

lack of confidence and the miss comprehension of

the model by the business actors.

Question 2: Why the business models are not

updated?

The answers to this question refer the lack of

motivation of the business people and the semantic

distance of the models from the daily activities and

the supporting software. It was also mentioned that

the management did not understand the importance

of the model. If the models are hard to understand,

they are also hard to update. There were answers

that refer that the people who build the models are

not aware of the updates of the business, and others

refers that many business models have irrelevant

information.

It seems that is necessary to create quality

measures for the models and to put these models

answering relevant and meaningful business

questions.

Exception Handling

The exceptions (deviations from the normal

flow) should be detected, analyzed and then make

decisions that could change the model.

A knowledge-based approach can be used for

exception handling. The tools used for business

process management should assist the modelers in

order to allow the analysis of the ideal processes,

anticipating the possible exceptions occurrences and

suggesting ways to detect and avoid them, adding

knowledge to the models [Dellarocas and Klein,

2000].

The basic idea is motivated by the observation

that most of the causes of process failures are

associated at least with one of the three elements that

constitutes a business process model: activity,

resource and restriction. [Dellarocas and Klein,

2000].

3 DYNAMIC MANAGEMENT

So that the organizational model became auto-

sustainable in the organization, the effort of the users

for its dynamic actualization has to be less than the

benefits it brings for the organization as a whole

(monitoring the deviations between strategy and

implementation by the analysis of different views,

politics view and task view) and to each business

actor separately (possibility of knowing what

activities belongs to them, what resource clients and

the suppliers are involved in each activity, what is

the responsibility chain, the metrics of quality

involved, etc.).

This vision is repeated simultaneously when we

change the level of detail of the model (Activity ->

Process -> Macro-Process). The business processes

are perceived as a supply chain, where each activity

is client of the precedent activity, implementing this

way the continuous improvement perspective. The

business actors have two distinct roles, sometimes

they are clients, sometimes are executers (figure 1).

Executer

Client

Preparation

Acepting Performance

Negociation

Satisfaction

conditions

Figure 1: Continuous improvement cycle

activities/processes

This concept derives from the workflow action

analysis cycle [Mentzas, 1999].

ICEIS 2004 - INFORMATION SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AND SPECIFICATION

562

The implementing cycle conditions are the

following: preparation (work proposal), negotiation

(contract about the work), Performance (execution

of the work and conclusion declaration) and

acceptation (where the client evaluate the work and

declares satisfaction)

When the As-Is model is in production each

business actor is responsible for its executing

activities as well as the activities from which he is

client, in a continuous improvement perspective. At

the business process level, the basic principles are

the same, where the owners of each process (or

owners, because sometimes the organizational

functional structure are not aligned with the

processes) have to get a more generic view, but have

to worry about his processes and the precedent ones,

super visioning the activities that compose the

processes. At the administration level, worries are

about the macro-processes, and its clients, the

external clients, in this case.

It is also necessary to design a support process,

which monitories all the actions related with all the

tasks embedded in the activities and processes

This process will be horizontal to the

organization. It will treat and record all the

information about the business objects (activities,

resources, information systems) in a knowledge

base, and it will do the exception handling

As-Is Organizational Meta Model

The meta model diagram of the As-Is model

management is represented in figure 2. The diagram

of the figure 2 was modeled with the CEO

framework [Vasconcelos et al, 2001].

Exception Handling Prototype

With the goal of testing the preliminary As-Is

meta-model, a prototype was developed (figure 3),

simulating the situation described in the diagram of

the figure 4.

This tool only detects exceptions that are related

to the resources changing.

The owners of the processes, and consequently,

the owners of the activities have the capacity of

surveying and validating the changing resources.

When the changed resource pass through more than

one process, the validating will be shared by the

owners of the involved processes

This can be illustrated looking at the figure 5: if

the executor of the activity C wants to change the

name of the consumed resource Y to W, the owner

of the P1 process and the owner of P2 process

receives hat information. The changing only takes

place if these two owners give the agreement.

This prototype was developed using a 3-tier

architecture (PHP® – Apache® – MySql®)

Information Gathering

The methodology used for the surveying,

analysis and validation of the information for

business process follows generically the

methodology presented in [Castela et al, 2002]. This

was used in several organizations to develop the As-

Is business model with success, but without the goal

of capturing exceptions and key mechanisms to

perform the management of the As-Is model referred

in this paper.

To achieve the new goals, and namely to make

the model usable for the business actors a new

approach is necessary. This approach has three

distinct dimensions or perspectives, respecting to the

information necessary to model the As-Is

organization – the organizational perspective (or

workflow perspective), the business actors

perspective and the IS perspective. Each of these

dimensions has its own modelling space or views.

These modelling spaces superimpose themselves in

Figure 3: Screen Shot of the prototype tool

Figure 4: Model used to develop the prototype

Figure 2: As-Is Meta Model using CEO

Framework

AS IS ORGANIZATIONAL MODELING: THE PROBLEM OF ITS DYNAMIC MANAGEMENT

563

the modelling views, depending of the invoked

context (figure 5).

Modeling the organization by the business actor

point of view corresponds to the particular way that

someone sees the organization. The organization

view, it is normally leaner, it is a kind of workflow

that abstracts itself from details. In the IS view, it is

necessary to capture also the activities that are only

explicit in its modelling space, like support activities

(e.g. back ups) and the context in which the IS’s

were developed (not always the IS supports

activities for which it were designed for, they tend to

be adapted for new necessities – and this is an

important information, even to measure alignments)

4 CONCLUSIONS

The prototype presented is still a first step in a more

ambitious project, with respect to the information

presented and, mainly, with respect to the number of

exceptions that can be treated. But it demonstrates

that is possible to maintain the As-Is model updated,

through the information given by each business actor

(workers and Owners), which promotes the

communication possibilities and necessities among

several actors, horizontally and vertically (with the

implementation of the observation points,

materialized here through the owners).

The idea, with these results, is to develop a more

complex generalization, which should identify all

the requirements to develop an As-Is model

manager. This will need the identification of all

types of exceptions that might occur, the

identification of the necessary information to make

the As-Is model executable (objects attributes,

operations, states, events, etc.) and the suitability to

adapt it to all types of organizations.

REFERENCES

Bhaskar, R., H.S. Lee, A. Levas, R. Pétrakian, F. Tsai and

B. Tulskie: Analysing and Re-Engineering Business

Process Using Simulation, Proceedings of the ACM’s

1994 Winter Simulation Conference, 1994.

N. Castela, J. Tribolet, A. Silva, A. Guerra: Business

Process Modeling with UML, Proceedings of the 3rd

International Conference on Enterprise Information

Systems (ICEIS), 2º Vol, pp 679-685, 7 – 10 July

2001, Setúbal, Portugal.

N. Castela, J. Tribolet, A. Guerra, E. Lopes: Survey,

Analysis and Validation of Information for Business

Process Modeling, Proceedings of the 4th International

Conference on Enterprise Information Systems

(ICEIS), 2º Vol, pp 803-806, 3 – 6 April 2002 Ciudad

Real, Spain

Dellarocas, C. and Klein, M.: A Knowledge-Based

Approach for Handling Excepcions in Business

Processes, Information Technology and Management,

Vol.1, 3, January 2000, pages 155-169

A state-of-the-art analysis by the Special Interest Group

(SIG) on Enterprise Modeling: Issues, Problems, and

Approaches”, International Conference on Enterprise

Integration Modeling Technology (ICEIMT) June 6-

10, 1992, South Carolina.

Giaglis, G., R. Paul and A. Serrano: Reconciliation of

Business and systems Modelling Via Discrete Event

Simulation, Proceedings of the ACM’s 1999 Winter

Simulation Conferences, 1999.

Gruninger, M., C. Schlenoff, A. Knutilla, and S. Ray:

Using Process Requirements as the Basis for the

Creation and Evaluation of Process Ontologies for

Entreprise Modeling, www.mel.nist.gov., 1996.

Gregory N. Mentzas: Coupling Object-Oriented and

Workflow Modelling in Business and Information

Process Reengineering, 1999.

Podolsky, M.: An Interated Approach to Object-Oriented

Modeling of Business Processes,

www.ibissoft.se/oocontr/podolsky.htm, 1999.

van Reijwoud, V.E. and van der Rijst, N.B.J.: Modeling

Business Communication for the Purpose of Business

Process Reengenireeng, Proceedings of the 3rd Annual

Conference on Information Systems Methodologies of

the British Computer Society pp. 173-184, Wrexham

6-8 September, 1995.

André Vasconcelos, Artur Caetano, João Neves, Pedro

Sinogas, Ricardo Mendes, José Tribolet. "A

Framework for Modeling Strategy, Business Processes

and Information Systems". In Proceedings of

International Conference on Enterprise Distributed

Object Computing 2001. Seattle, USA, Setembro

2001.

Figure 5: The three different perspectives

ICEIS 2004 - INFORMATION SYSTEMS ANALYSIS AND SPECIFICATION

564