achieve the goal of the activity.
The actor A01 has the responsibility to capture
activities. Even though there are several methods,
none is sufficiently clear in the way that activities
can be obtained. Therefore we propose transaction
T01, as a novel way to apprehend activities from an
ontological model of an organization. We take
advantage of some overlapping concepts between the
DEMO and Activity theory that helps to delimit the
identification of scope of organization activities
through DEMO Model. The main idea is to use
DEMO to find useful activities, being clear that
Activity Theory was not a DEMO substitute.
The actor A02 has the responsibility to capture
detail of each activity, i.e. he/she identifies the
elements of an activity, such as: actions, operations,
subject, tools and business and social rules. This task
is an iterative one. It continuously tries to capture
missing or changing elements. The actions aim at the
planned goals, and required resources must be taking
into account in the environment as well as their
affordances and constraints. These
physical executions of actions are named operations,
and they must be comprehended by
the conditions given at the moment of execution.
We use The DEMO concepts of phase and steps
to help us to capture and structure activity actions
and operations. We proposed that an activity has
three main phases that correspond to the three phases
of a transaction (Order-phase, Execution-phase and
Deliver-phase). Each phase has a unique step with a
well-defined goal. We link each goal action to step;
therefore, the goal of an action is to fulfil the step.
The operations represent the task that we do to
achieve the action.
The actor A03 has the responsibility of
identifying relationships between activities, notably
it defines the different types of articulations
considered to relate the activities. To connect the
activities we contemplated two types of
interconnections that represent two types of
relationships between activities. They are: (i) a
sequential relation and an (ii) inclusion relation.
When activities have a sequential relationship, it
means that the result of an activity is the object of
another activity. In this case there is a temporal
relationship between the first and the second activity
and the second can only happen after the first
produces its result.
4.1 Introduction Contradictions in the
Organization Control Model
The introduction of activity in organizational
control is done through contradictions discovered in
transaction T04. The result of the contradictions
discovery leads to identify the metrics that should be
monitored, as well as the feasibility of these rules.
This work is done by transaction T05 and executed
by actor A05.
The Activity´s contradictions will be discovered
by analysing its set of elements. We propose the use
of three sets of relations between the following
elements of a single activity: subject/tools,
subject/object and norms/object. Each set will be
associated to a metric mentioned below:
(1) Metric between subject and tools. These metric
measures the contradictions that express the
misalignment between tools and subjects to
access the object of activity. It also express the
support of execution of actions and operations
(for example, what is the tool that is used to
access the updated list of the organization's
products, and what people think it is his
problems);
(2) Metric between subject and object. It measures
misalignment between the subject and the object
of an activity by counting the cancelation of
coordination acts. It is computed by calculating
the cancellation of promise acts and the
cancellation of delivery acts;
(3) Metric between norms and subject, will measure
the feasibility of achieving the result of the
activity. This metric is the type usually
associated to the business objectives (e.g. total
revenue per month minimum activity will be
5,000 Euros).
Figure 5 presents the proposed the new
Organization Object Fact Diagram for organizational
control. This model integrates the contradiction
measures into organizational control.
VIABILITY
NORM
MESURE
MESURE has VIABILITY NORM
ACTIVITY
NORMS OBJECT SOBJECT TOOLS
CONTRADITION CONTRADITION CONTRADITION
Figure 5: Introduction contradiction in control model.
UsingActivityDiagramsandDEMOtoCaptureRelevantMeasuresinanOrganizationalControl-ACaseStudyon
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