Representing Organizational Structures in an Enterprise Architecture Language

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture (EA) promotes the establishment of a holistic view of the structure and way of working of an organization. One of the aspects covered in EA is associated with the organization’s “active structure”, which concerns “who” undertakes organizational activities. Several approaches have been proposed in order to provide a means for representing enterprise architectures, among which the ArchiMate, an EA modeling language. In this paper, we present a semantic analysis of the fragment of the ArchiMate metamodel related with the representation of active structure. In addition, we present a proposal to extend the metamodel based on a well-founded ontology for the organizational domain. Our objective is to enrich the language with important capabilities to represent organizational structures using a principled ontology-based approach.

Highlights

Introduction

  • the description of an EA usually “takes the form of a comprehensive set of cohesive models that describe the structure and functions of an enterprise”
  • majority of EA frameworks considers an organization as a system whose elements include: (i) organizational activities structured in business processes and services; (ii) information systems supporting organizational activities; (iii) underlying information technology (IT) infrastructures, and (iv) organizational structures (organizational actors, roles and organizational units)
    • This last domain of elements is also called “active structure” [2] and concerns “who” undertakes organizational activities.
    • Active structure focuses on the business agents that perform tasks and seek to achieve goals, encompassing the definition of business roles, authority relationships, communication lines, work groups, etc.
    • from the perspective of enterprise information systems, organizational actors can be considered as system owners, system maintainers, system users or simply system stakeholders in general, affecting the usage and evolution of such system

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