A STRATEGIC MODELING TECHNIQUE FOR CHANGE
MANAGEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS UNDERGOING BPR
Subhas C. Misra, Vinod Kumar, Uma Kumar
Carleton University, 1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Keywords: Organizational Modeling, Business Process Reengineer
ing, Change Management.
Abstract: Modern day organizations seek to rationalize, innovate, and adapt to changing environments, and
circumstances as part of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) efforts. Irrespective of the process
reengineering program selected, and the technique used to model, BPR brings with it the issues of
organizational, and process changes, which involves managing organizational changes (also called “change
management”). Change management is non-trivial, as organizational changes are difficult to accomplish.
Though some attempt has been made to model change management in enterprise information systems using
conventional conceptual modeling techniques, they have just addressed “what” a change process is like, and
they don’t address “why” the process is the way it is. Our approach is novel in the sense that it presents an
actor-dependency-based 5-phased technique for analyzing, and modeling early-phase requirements of
change management that provides the motivations, intents, and rationales behind activities.
1 INTRODUCTION
Modern day organizations are extensively dynamic,
as they seek to rationalize, innovate, and adapt to
changing circumstances as part of BPR efforts
(Kueng et al., 1996). There exist different process
redesign models for use in the analysis, design, and
implementation phases (Georgakopoulos et al.,
1995, Kueng et al., 1996, Mylopoulos et al., 1999,
Ould, 1995). In contrast to the previously proposed
modeling techniques, we use a novel approach in our
proposed solution by modeling intentional
relationships between actors of a project (see, for
example, Chung et al., 2000, and Yu, 1997) to
explore the structural origins of changes in a BPR
project.
2 MODELING DEPENDENCIES
BETWEEN STRATEGIC
ACTORS
In this paper we discuss the application of actor
dependency concept using i* (see, for example,
Chung et al., 2000, Yu, 1997). In order to model
change management problems, two i* diagrams are
used: Strategic Dependency Model (SD), and
Strategic Rational Model (SR). SD diagram is used
to model dependencies between actors, while SR
diagram is used to model internally why each actor
has those dependencies. In other words, SD
describes dependencies at a higher level of
abstraction than SR.
3 MODELING CHANGE
MANAGEMENT: CASE STUDY
To demonstrate our approach for modeling change
management problems, we have considered the case
study of a company, Ergonomic Systems, Inc.,
undergoing change in its organizational systems
(details can be found in Harmon, 2003). We briefly
introduce the problem in Section 3.1.
3.1 The Ergonomic Systems, Inc.
Ergonomic Systems, Inc. is a company that
manufactures, and sells integrated office accessories,
and furniture meant for high-tech office
environments. Its major product is Ergo Chair,
which is an award-winning, well-designed chair.
The executives of Ergonom
ic Systems, Inc. had
decided many years ago that they would not be
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McLeod D. (2005).
SEMANTICS-BASED SIMILARITY DECISIONS FOR ONTOLOGIES.
In Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 447-450
DOI: 10.5220/0002554904470450
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

interested to embrace Internet Technology (IT).
However, recently the company has been acquired
by a third party who is interested in evaluating the
adoption of IT. Consequently, an important meeting
was scheduled, and the following are among a few
of the decisions that were made:
(i) Examine Ergo Chair value chain, and identify
opportunities to improve productivity.
(ii) Create a portal that would allow customers to
contact the company via the Web.
3.2 Modeling Change Management
In this section, a solution of the above change
management problem is described in phases as
discussed below, and the problem is modeled using
the actor dependency concept. The idea of breaking
down the problem into five phases has been partially
motivated by the solution of Harmon, 2003.
However, Harmon’s modeling technique is based on
conventional approaches.
3.2.1 Phase I: The redesign of Ergo Chair
Order Process is planned
In the first phase, planning work is carried out. A
planning phase should determine project scope, and
actors. In this project, the following actors were
identified:
• External Actors: Customers, and Suppliers.
• Internal Actors: Finance, Manufacturing, and
Sales.
In this redesign, following goals have been
identified:
• All orders should be submitted immediately
from Sales to Finance in order to deliver Ergo
Chairs to clients as soon as possible. Currently,
orders take some more time to be submitted. As
a consequence, customers are dissatisfied.
• All orders should be submitted correctly.
• As part of corporate goals, Ergonomic Systems
must keep sales growth levels.
• As part of corporate goals, Ergonomic Systems
must keep highest profit margins.
3.2.2 Phase II: The current Ergo Chair
Order Process is analysed
The first, and key step in this phase is to understand,
and describe the current Ergo Chair Order Process.
After the initial diagrams are drawn, they must
be discussed with the redesign team. These diagrams
will be the documentation work on which
discussions should be based. All team players should
provide feedback to these diagrams. Next, diagrams
should be refined. Figure 1 shows current Ergo
Chair order process that is modeled using a SD
diagram. SR is not modeled at this stage, since only
some evident details to be improved were identified.
After Ergo Chair Order Process is redesigned, SR
diagram will be included.
3.2.3 Phase III: The current Ergo Chair
Order Process is improved
An important change has been detected from the
previous phase: Finance should manage credit
problems by itself, and not through Sales.
Now the new SD diagram is modelled, after the
required changes are taken into consideration. The
new SD diagram is not shown here, but the SR
diagram for Customers is shown in Figure 2. The SR
diagrams for actors Sales, and Finance are similarly
modeled and are omitted here.
3.2.4 Phase IV: The Ergo Chair Order
Process is redesigned
The SD diagram for the Online Order Process is
modelled, but is omitted from here to maintain
brevity of the paper. Figure 3 illustrates the SR
diagram for the actor, Web Portal.
3.2.5 Phase V: Implementing the New Ergo
Chair Order Process
After redesigning efforts are finished, we obtain
well-documented diagrams, and rationale behind
them. The next step is to implement the suggested
changes. These issues are beyond the scope of
discussion in this paper.
4 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we have provided a novel approach,
using a 5-phased technique for analyzing, and
modeling early-phase requirements of
organizational change management problems. The
technique can reason about the opportunities, and
changes that are associated with BPR.
REFERENCES
Chung, L., Nixon, B.A., Yu, E., Mylopoulos, J. 2000.
Non-Functional Requirements in Software
Engineering, Kluwer Academic Publishers.
Georgakopoulos, D., Hornick, M. and Seth, A., 1995. An
Overview of Workflow Management: From Process
Modeling to Workflow Automation Infrastructure,
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Distributed and Parallel Databases, 3(2), pp. 119-
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Harmon, P., 2003. Business Process Change, Morgan
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APPENDIX
Mylopoulos, J., Chung, L., Yu, E., 2001. From Object-
Oriented to Goal-Oriented Requirements Analysis,
Communications of the ACM, 42(1), pp. 31-37.
The Appendix contains all the figures referred to in the
paper.
Ould, M., 1995. Business Processes: Modeling and
Analysis for Reengineering and Improvement, John
Wiley & Sons, Chichester.
Figure 1: SD diagram for current chair order process.
A STRATEGIC MODELING TECHNIQUE FOR CHANGE MANAGEMENT IN ORGANIZATIONS UNDERGOING
BPR
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Figure 2: SR diagram for improved Ergo Chair order process: Actor Customer.
Figure 3: SR diagram for Online Ergo Chair order process: Actor Web Portal.
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