Understanding the Realization of Organizations

Abstract

An organization can be understood as a social system, i.e. a system whose elements are social individuals or actors. The actors operate in an environment of customers, suppliers, partners and others which share a part of the organization’s world. The effects of the acts of all of these actors can be understood as state changes of the organization’s world. All information that is needed by the actors consists in either the facts that constitute the world’s states or in information that is derived from these facts. In DEMO (Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations) an organization is conceived as the layered nesting of three aspect organizations: the B-organization (from Business), the I-organization (from Intelligence) and the D-organizations (from Document). Whereas B-actors perform business acts, I-actors remember and derive information concerning the business, and D-actors store, transport and retrieve documents that contain this information. The design of the integration between the B-, the I-, and the D-organization is called the realization of the organization. This paper presents and discusses how the realization of organizations can be understood thoroughly, as well as how the I-organization can be derived from the B-organization, and the D-organization from the I-organization.