A BPMN Extension to Support Organizational Structure Evaluation, Case study: Service Desk of University of Tehran

Abstract

Different companies of different sizes are struggling with the pressing challenges of economic pressures, market conditions, customer preferences, and technological innovations. In response, many are changing the design of their organization to make them more flexible. But there are no proper methods and tools for designing an organization at the age of information and big data which suggest a specific design fit to a particular organization. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes to extend the business process modeling notation (BPMN 2.0) to organizational structure concepts so that a common modeling formalism can address different types of structure dimensions such as centralization, formalization, and complexity. This innovation helps the designers of the organization to evaluate their structure designs before implementing them in a simulation space provided by the process architecture repository. This extension, called BPMNOS, is methodically designed using BPMN 2.0 development mechanisms proposed by (Stroppi, Chiotti, et al. 2011), and (Braun 2015) based on BPMN conceptual framework introduced by OMG (OMG 2013). In this method, after exploring concepts in the subject domain the researcher maps these concepts to BPMN and then suggests new ones and new notations to achieve new goals. The results of a laboratory experiment show that the extension supports designers for a more comprehensive understanding of their design. And the result of structure dimension index calculation based on this tool is close to the standard questionnaire result.