One of the main issues with the activities related to modeling and improving business processes is the complexity of the current organizational structures. In many cases, an enterprise could improve its performance if it could align its processes to a specific architectural style, as this would facilitate the analysis tasks and the subsequent design of information systems. However, currently there are few guidelines to systematically adapt as-is business models to a certain organizational style. In this paper, a methodological approach is presented in order to identify the organizational style closest to the business model of an enterprise and to provide a guide for adapting a specific business model to the structure-in-5 style. The proposed approach has been applied in several real case studies.
Nowadays, the organizational modeling in the early requirements phase has
been recognized by software engineers as a way of accurately determine the needs of
software systems, concerned with the understanding of a problem by studying an
organizational setting [
The objective of the research was to define a methodological approach to analyze a current enterprise model (representing the as-is business model view) to determine its proximity to the Structure-in-5 style, and then, to adapt the enterprise model to one of the eight specific variants of this organizational style (generating the to-be business model view). To do this, the following sub-objectives must be fulfilled: a) to use Tropos in order to model the configurations of the Structure-in-5 style. b) To define patterns for the identification process of the closest organizational style to the analyzed business model, and c) To define guidelines that direct the adaptation process of an organizational model represented in Tropos to a variant of the Structure-in-5 style. 3
The proposed methodological approach consists of four phases. In the first phase, we have analized the Mintzberg's proposal to identify organizational styles and their main characteristics. In second phase, we have developed patterns to identify the organizational style closest to the business model of an enterprise. In third phase, we have proposed a pattern identification process, and finally in the fourth phase, we have proposed a guidelines-based adaptation process to modify the current is-as business model to be adapted to a specific organizational style. 3.1
Structure-in-5 is a theory of organizational design proposed by Mintzberg [
Simple Structure type 1 Simple Structure type 2
The pattern definition process is composed by two steps: 1) the analysis of
coordinating mechanisms of each variant of the Structure-in-5 style and 2) the analysis of
the configuration of the structure of each variant. These analyses were based on the
design parameters described in [
The process to identify the pattern for an organizational model is as follows: 1) classifying the actors of the organizational model into the substructures considered in the Structure-in-5 style: the Strategic Apex, the Midline, the Operative Center, the techno-structure and the support, additionally we include those actors detected in the analysis of Structure-in-5 style: Division, Staff of Experts, Staff of Workers, Staff of Administrators and Clients. 2) Once the actors of the model have been classified, the substructures are compared by applying the set of guidelines that take into account the type of actors that composed the remaining model, for example, if the model contains only the Strategic Apex (with most of model dependencies) and the Operating Core, then the model is classified as Simple Structure (Fig. 1). 3.4
The model adaptation process of organizational models towards the Structure-in-5
style requires to recognize the differences between the analyzed organizational model
and the identified pattern in order to modify the model accordingly to make it more
similar to the pattern. The model adaptation process is composed by three steps: 1)
classifying the model dependencies, 2) comparing the dependencies and 3) adapting
the model. Once the pattern corresponding to the model has been identified, the first
step consists of classifying the organizational model dependencies according to the
dependencies of the pattern, identifying in this way, classified and unclassified
dependencies. The second step consists of comparing the number of classified and
unclassified dependencies to obtain a comparative grade. The comparative grade is
obtained through a comparative method [
The objective of the case study was to determine if the proposed methodology would allow the adaptation of organizational models represented in the Tropos framework to the Structure-in-5 style. In order to demonstrate the application of the methodology, five case studies have been performed. Following we present the details of one of these cases which is related with OXXO, the largest small format chain store in Mexico and Latin America with more than 30 years of service and more than 10,715 establishments across Mexico. It is important to note that the first and second phase of our approach were carried out only to identify the eight variants based on the Structure-in-5 style and the adaptation process, therefore they were not carried out with each case study. In order to apply the approach, first, the OXXO store is represented as a Tropos model. Figure 2a shows the Tropos representation of OXXO stores. In this model were identified 3 actors: store manager, store attendant and general assistants. The model consists of 15 dependencies. We describe below the third and fourth phases of the methodology followed with the OXXO case study. a) b)
Pattern identification process: The actors of the OXXO model were grouped into the substructures defined in Phase 2. Therefore, the store manager was classified as the Strategic Apex, the store attendant was classified as the Middle Line and the general assistants were classified as Operating Cores. Applying the guidelines of the pattern identification process, the direct supervision is identified as the coordinating mechanism. The store manager has the majority of the responsibilities and dependencies with other actors; therefore he takes all of the relevant decisions. The model represents a business model with few actors, situation that is common in simple structures (Table 1). Therefore, the selected pattern for the OXXO model is Simple Structure which is composed by 8 dependencies.
Model adaptation process: Once the pattern corresponding to the model is identified, the adaptation process is performed resulting in: the OXXO model contains 14 dependencies, where 4 dependencies of the pattern of the Simple Structure give support to 6 dependencies of the model, 4 dependencies of the pattern were not found in the model and 9 dependencies of the model which were not classified. According to the comparative method, defined in phase 4, the comparative degree of the OXXO model is of superiority, because the OXXO model has more elements than the pattern. Finally, we applied a set of guidelines to adapt the OXXO model which creates a new organizational model as result. For the case study, the adapted business model becomes as follows: the actors of the original model remain the same, 4 dependencies were added that give support to the pattern, also 4 dependencies of the pattern that were not found in the model are added, such as “Strategy formulation”, “Supervise” and “Problem management”. Finally, the 9 unclassified dependencies were added to adapted model because these represent particular activities in the OXXO store model. In Figure 2b, the Tropos model of the organization OXXO is shown which has been adapted to the Simple Structure pattern. 5
In this paper, a set of eight variants of the Structure-in-5 style where developed
based on the Mintzberg work [