Process engineering – at the crossroads of Engineering collaboration and Collaborative engineering
For today’s organizations, the sustainability seems almost impossible without organizational learning: a shared memory which is the place of representations and reasoning. Three assumptions accompanied my reflection regarding the purposes of modeling: (i) Representations are useful to understand and be confident to share the same understanding; it is also a prerequisite to be able to reason about a complex reality through models; (ii) To capitalize those representations requires the ability to ensure their accessibility (sharing) and accuracy; (iii) The flexibility of those representations facilitates their evolution ; Reasoning about variants supports and guides the change of the enterprise in all its dimensions. We observed deep and multi-form transformations in the socioeconomic environments during the three last decades. Researches in information systems have to produce formalisms and methodological approaches to satisfy challenging requirements. 1- The efficiency of an organization depends on the efficiency of its work groups: The understanding of cooperation requirements in all its dimensions (communication, coordination, collaboration), as well as of the ways the software systems should support it, is a worthwhile subject for information systems related researches. 2- Organizational change is permanent and it is essential to build flexible structures that can adapt most readily to changes: Need for formalisms with the ability to represent (i) business processes and their links with software components and (ii) the variable and/or evolutive nature (thus sometimes highly decisional) of these processes. 3- A new role is assigned to information systems: support (service provider) to the enterprise strategy; this requires understanding the socio-technical system in its entirety and complexity. Need for formalisms and approaches with the ability to represent (i) the different elements of an organization and (ii) the links between these elements belonging to different dimensions or perspectives (including the perspective of change), to check the coherence of those links, and to guide in a systematic way the construction of those enterprise models and the underlying rationality. 4- Decisions regarding the development of those systems are among the most important to be taken by the enterprise leaders in terms of investments: Need for formalisms with the ability to represent (i) business processes and their links with software components and (ii) the variable and/or evolutive (thus more and more often highly decisional) nature of these processes.
Lecture at NEMO2021
Date/Time: Thursday, July 22, 2021 at 13:00