=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=Vol-1102/amino2013_proceedings_introduction
|storemode=property
|title=Introduction
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1102/amino2013_proceedings_introduction.pdf
|volume=Vol-1102
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/models/BarnCFFKT13
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==Introduction==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1102/amino2013_proceedings_introduction.pdf
Towards the Model Driven Organization
1st AMINO Workshop
Introduction to the th
Held at the ACM/IEEE 16 International Conference on
Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems
MODELS 2013 Miami Florida USA
Balbir Barn1 , Tony Clark1 , Robert France2 , Ulrich Frank3 , Vinay Kulkarni4 ,
and Dan Turk2
1
Middlesex University, London, UK
2
Colorado State University, Colorado, USA
3
Universty of Dusibirg-Essen, Essen, Germany
4
Tata Consultancy Services, India
Organizations such as banks and public sector institutions can be thought
of as being structured in three key layers. The strategic layer defines what an
organization must achieve in terms of its high-level goals, the tactical layer de-
fines how an organization plans to behave and thereby achieve its goals, and the
operational layer defines the day-to-day running of the organization in a manner
that is consistent with the organization’s plans. The operational layer of a mod-
ern organization is implemented in terms of a collection of inter-connected IT
systems that form an organizational platform. An organization seeks to align its
high-level goals with its platform so that its strategy is properly supported by its
IT infrastructure. Expressing and achieving alignment remains a key challenge
for modern organizations.
Essentially organizations exist to accomplish specific goals. In the case of a
not-for-profit organization, the goals are often expressed as a mission statement.
In the case of a for-profit organization, the mission should also include achiev-
ing profit for investors. Frequently these goals are not consciously or explicitly
written down or even clearly recognized. But, even so, they still exist. Whether
goals are explicitly identified and documented or not, organizations wish to know
whether the goals are achieved and, where possible, concrete metrics may be used
to help answer these questions.
Whilst top-level organizational goals can often be captured as relatively sim-
ple mission statements, the internal processes, resources, IT systems and struc-
tures that are put in place to realise the goals are usually highly complex. Mea-
suring aspects of a typical large multi-national corporation in order to determine
its internal consistency, to measure quality metrics, to perform any number of
change-based activities, and ultimately to establish consistency between the or-
ganizational goals and the human- and IT-centric processes by which it operates,
is a difficult task.
In the field of software system development, it is accepted that various forms
of modelling need to be brought to bear on the problem of measuring complex
system properties, controlling its behaviour and to establish that an implemen-
tation satisfies its specification. The key feature at play is abstraction where
unnecessary detail is elided leaving important aspects of a system to be repre-
sented in a language that is suitable for the stakeholders and exhibits appropriate
properties for reasoning, transformation, simulation etc. Our claim is that the
same use of abstraction through modelling can be applied to the problems of
managing an organization, leading to the idea of a Model-Driven Organization:
Def: A Model-Driven Organization (MDO) is an institution that uses
models, both formally and informally, in conscious and intentional ways,
throughout the organization to define who it is and what it does, to help
better and more quickly train employees, to carry out, assess, and im-
prove its functioning, and to more effectively develop and modify systems
that support the organization.
The use of models in system development has established the fields of Model
Driven Architecture (MDA) and Model Driven Engineering (MDE). Although
these fields use models as abstractions of systems in order to establish properties,
they predominantly use models to help with system construction during the
design phase. In some cases part or all of the program code for a system is
generated from models.
Although MDA/MDE may be viewed as providing a contribution, the MDO
vision is much broader than system development. An MDO uses models at mul-
tiple levels: Organizational level models, not just system / software level mod-
els; conceptual, as well as technical models; strategic, tactical, and operational
models. MDO models relate to much more than just the IT systems of an or-
ganization and need not be expressed in a formal language. The models must
address people-centric aspects of an organization in addition to the systems-level
aspects. We can see this by comparing the definition of the MDO as given above,
with the following two common definitions for MDE and MDA:
Def: Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is a software development method-
ology which focuses on creating and exploiting domain models (that is,
abstract representations of the knowledge and activities that govern a
particular application domain), rather than on the computing (or algo-
rithmic) concepts.
Def: Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) is a software design approach for
the development of software systems. It provides a set of guidelines for
the structuring of specifications, which are expressed as models. Model-
driven architecture is a kind of domain engineering, and supports model-
driven engineering of software systems. It was launched by the Object
Management Group (OMG) in 2001.
Our claim is that a model-based approach can be used in many ways within an
organization. Models can be used to describe the organization itself, its struc-
ture, its processes, its business rules, its regulatory constraints, etc. This can
help in a wide variety of organization-centric use-cases including training new
employees and helping outsiders better understand and effectively interact with
the organization. These models may be able to help potential investors compare
organizations, or even make it easier to merge organizations. They may make
it easier to compare the functioning of organizations, or systems within orga-
nizations, to allow decision-makers to better determine which parts of merged
organizations to keep and which to eliminate after a merger takes place, for
instance. Models may be used to help in the analysis of an organization, to de-
termine and clearly identify its mission, and assess how well it is meeting its
goals.
If the models are formalized and automated, it may be possible to ease and/or
automate some types of changes within an organization. And, of course, models
have had a long history of helping to automate parts of organizations.
Achieving the MDO vision will involve expertise from many different dis-
ciplines. Experts in modelling will be required to design suitable languages
both domain-specific and general purpose using appropriate meta-technologies.
Expertise in model processing including transformation, synchronization and
model-checking will be required. Experts in the field of Organization Theory
will be required to understand the structures and processes to be modelled.
Information Systems experts will be required to analyse and represent the on-
tologies and complex data used within an organization. Management theorists
will be required to understand the human-centric aspects of the problem and
where models can be used to facilitate all stakeholders. Experts in tools will be
required to determine how to offer the features of the MDO in an effective way.
The goals of the AMINO workshop are to work towards a better under-
standing of where models can be used to address all aspects of organizational
development, operation and management use-cases. The workshop took the form
of an invited speaker and presentations of 7 peer reviewed papers. The rest of
this introduction provides an overview of the presentations.
In Goals, Domains, and Enterprise Architecture in the Model-Driven Organi-
zation Desmond D’Souza argues that goal models are fundamental to achieving
the MDO. He presents a notation and method for incremental model construc-
tion in terms of goals and their constraints over domains. The paper concludes
by indicating how goals can be exploited in other MDO areas including archi-
tectures and migration plans.
In Multimodel-Driven Software Engineering for Evolving Enterprise Systems
Richard Paige, Radu Calinescu, Dimitrios S. Kolovos, Nicholas Matragkas and
Dave Cliff address the issue of organizational evolution and how to analyse the
Quality of Service (QoS) issues that arise. The paper proposes a multimodel-
driven approach (MMSE) and concludes with some thoughts about a research
agenda that will lead to solutions in this area.
Organisations consist of many different roles that link to business processes
and provide access to information at various security levels. In UML/OCL based
Design and Analysis of Role-Based Access Control Policies Oliver Hofrichter,
Martin Gogolla, and Karsten Sohr discuss an approach to modelling the access
control and use OCL to address a case study based on EasyChair.
As discussed above, a key feature of the MDO is goal-IT alignment. In Meta-
model Patterns for Expressing Relationships Between Organization Model Con-
cepts and Software Implementation Concepts Jens Gulden discusses this issue
and provides patterns for mapping between the two levels.
The state-of-the-art in Enterprise Modelling and Enterprise Architecture uses
enterprise frameworks to represent and reason about aspects of an organisation
or even its entirety. Few of these frameworks use modelling technologies and tech-
niques. In MDE Support for Enterprise Architecture in an Industrial Context: the
TEAP Framework Experience Hugo Bruneliere, Jordi Cabot, Stphane Drapeau,
Flavien Somda, William Piers, Juan David Villa Calle and Jean-Christophe
Lafaurie describe a new framework called TEAP that applies Model Driven
Engineering techniques to the construction of an enterprise framework.
In many ways organisations are more complex that standard software sys-
tems and the structures, information, resources and processes involved are less
precise. Therefore it is important to understand the reasoning behind design de-
cisions and the reasons for organisational change. In Introducing Argumentative
and Discursive Enterprise Leading and Management Sebastian Bittmann, Balbir
Barn, Tony Clark and Oliver Thomas develop this theme in terms of argumen-
tation theory as a basis for recording the intentions behind organisation-related
actions.
There are many different organizational use-cases involved in achieving an
MDO. One is mergers and acquisitions whereby two organisations become one. In
(Multi-) Modeling Enterprises for Better Decisions Sagar Sunkle, Vinay Kulka-
rni, and Hemant Rathod argue that in order to represent and reason about such
complex use-cases it is necessary to use multi-models.
The MDO is likely to involve the use of models in many different ways. Some
of these may simply be to help understand the organisation, but others may help
to operationalise it. In Enterprise Models as Drivers for IT Security Manage-
ment at Runtime Anat Goldstein and Sietse Overbeek discuss the technique of
models@Runtime and its use to achieve IT security.