Model (CM) specifies the construction of the
organization: the actor roles in the composition and
the environment, as well as the transaction kinds in
which they are involved. The Process Model (PM)
specifies the state space and the transition space of
the coordination world. The State Model (SM)
specifies the state space and the transition space of
the production world. The Action Model (AM)
consists of the action rules that serve as guidelines
for the actor roles in the composition of the
organization.
In Figures 1 and 2, respectively, the meaning
triangle and the ontological parallelogram, taken
from (Dietz, 2005) which explain how (individual)
concepts are created in the human mind. We will
also base our claims in the model triangle, taken
from (Dietz, 2006) and presented in Figure 3. We
find that the model triangle coherently overlaps the
meaning triangle. This happens because a set of
symbols – like a set of DEMO representations
(signs) that constitute a symbolic system – allows
the interpretation of a set of concepts – like a set of
DEMO aspect models, part of the ontological model,
constituting a conceptual system. This conceptual
system, in turn, consists in the conceptualization of
the “real” inter-subjective organizational self, i.e.,
the set of OAs constituting the concrete organization
system's composition structure and production.
Figure 4 is an adaptation from the model triangle of
Figure 3 and depicts our reasoning. We call the set
of all DEMO diagrams, tables and lists used to
formulate the ontological model as ontological
representation.
Now relating with the meaning triangle, we can
verify that a particular sign (e.g., a transaction
symbol with label membership fee payment), part of
an ontological representation (e.g., actor transaction
diagram, representing a library's construction model)
designates (i.e., allows the interpretation or is the
formulation) of the respective concept of the
particular transaction part of the respective
ontological model (e.g., construction model). This
subjective concept, in turn, refers to a concrete
object of the shared inter-subjective reality of the
organization's human agents (e.g., the particular OA
transaction T02). Figure 5, an adaptation from the
meaning triangle depicts this other reasoning.
Another example of an OA related with T02
would be the transaction initiation OA, relating T02
with actor role registrar (also designated by A02)
and formulated by a line connecting the transaction
and actor role symbols of T02 and A02. Actor role
registrar is, in turn, another OA of the construction
space of the library. Once such role is communicated
to all employees of a library, it becomes a “living”
abstract object part of the shared inter-subjective
reality of the library's human agents. Such object,
along with other OAs of the organizational inter-
subjective reality, give human agents a way to
conceptualize their organizational responsibilities –
in this case, requesting membership fee payments to
aspirant members. We name this set of all abstract
objects living in the inter-subjective reality of an
organization's members as the organizational self.
By explicitly formalizing this set of abstract objects
that we call organization artifacts and making this
formalization and their representation available and
changeable in a distributed way we aim to achieve
organizational self-awareness, described in more
detail in (Aveiro and Pinto, 2013).
2.2 EE Tools Supporting DEMO
To generalize the access and awareness of the
organizational reality is not a trivial task. Such tool
must not only enable the collection of distributed
and coherent organizational knowledge aligned with
the organizational reality but also be understandable
and of easy use by any of the organization's
collaborators. This collection of organizational
knowledge should be in an integrated repository of
both the conceptual understanding and the symbolic
understanding in the form of diagrams and tables.
There are some solutions for DEMO modeling like
Visio (Microsoft 2010) (only diagrams), Xemod
(MPRISE 2010) and ModelWorld (Hommes, 2013),
but we found ourselves facing the same issues with
all of them. For our objectives Visio would be the
less helpful, as it offers no support for anything but
diagram specification, and even that support is
achieved by custom made stencils that until now
have a very limited way of enforcing the rules and/or
restrictions of the modeling language. Visio also
fails to help us with our needs of generalized access
and awareness of organizational reality and
facilitating incremental changes to models of
organizational reality, as it does not present a way of
offering a generalized access to the knowledge nor it
facilitates any kind of coherent incremental change.
A change in a diagram is exclusively a change in
that diagram, it does not propagate to other diagrams
that share the same organizational fact.
Xemod is a tool built exclusively for DEMO
modeling and as such offers another level of support.
This support comes at a cost, as this is also a far
more expensive tool than a basic license of Visio.
But even though in Xemod we have a set of rules to
help us model and support for the whole
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