Towards the Model Driven Organisation (MDO)

2016-02-23
Modern organisations are faced with the very challenging problem of rapidly responding to continual external business pressures in order to sustain their competitiveness or to effectively perform mission-critical services. Difficulties arise because the continual evolution of systems and operational procedures that are performed in response to the external pressures eventually leads to suboptimal configurations of the systems and processes that drive the organisation.

The management of continuous business change is complicated by the current lack of effective mechanisms for rapidly responding to multiple change drivers. The use of inadequate change management methods and technologies introduces accidental complexities that significantly drive up the cost, risk, and effort of making changes. These problems provide opportunities for developing and applying organisation modelling approaches that seek to improve an organisation's ability to effectively evolve in response to changes in its business environment.

Modelling an organisation to better support organisational evolution leads to what we call a Model Driven Organisation (MDO), where an MDO is an organisation in which models are the primary means for interacting with and evolving the systems that drive an organisation.

Definition: A Model Driven Organisation uses models in the analysis, design, simulation, delivery, operation, and maintenance of systems to address its strategic, tactical and operational needs and its relation to the wider environment.

An organisation's Enterprise Systems (ES) support a wide-range of business activities including planning, business intelligence, operationalisation, and reporting. ES are thus pivotal to a company's competitiveness. Modelling technologies and approaches that address the development, analysis, deployment and maintenance of ES have started to emerge. Such technologies and approaches must support a much broader collection of use-cases than traditional technologies for systems design modelling. Current ES architectures do not adequately address the growing demands for inter-organisational collaboration, flexibility and advanced decision support in organisations.

Realising the MDO vision will require research that cross-cuts many areas, including research on enterprise architectures, business process. and workflow modelling, system requirements and design modelling, meta-modelling, and models@runtime.

This special issue will bring together articles that describe issues and results relating to achieving the MDO vision. In particular the following issues are deemed in scope:

  • Models used to support organisations.
  • Model-based simulation of organisations.
  • Model-based quality assurance of organisations.
  • Achieving organisational agility through models.
  • Using models to enhance organisation capability.
  • Using models to allow organisation to engage with emerging technologies.
  • Using models to understand and analyse organisations.
  • Languages and meta-modelling to support organisations.

Submission:

The Guest Editor (Tony Clark, Sheffield Hallam University, UK, t.clark@shu.ac.uk) invites submissions to this special issue that are deemed within scope as described above.

The submissions must follow the journal's guidelines for general submissions and should be either 'Original Research Contributions' or 'Experience Reports' and will be subject to the normal journal review process.

In particular, authors should ensure that they follow the author instructions and style guidelines available from

https://www.emisa-journal.org/emisa/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

Make sure to enter 'SI Towards the Model Driven Organisation (MDO)' in the 'Comments to the editor(s)' text field in step 1 of the submission process.

Timescales:

(1) Intent to submit including abstract: April 1, 2016 (via email to t.clark@shu.ac.uk)
(2) Full submission of article: July 4, 2016
(3) Deadline for first round reviews: Nov 1, 2016