Theory-Driven Reverse Engineering of Organisations

Abstract

Driven by the strong demand for reusable yet situational business solutions on the one side and thenecessity to provide a stable, reliant foundation that allows to adapt the supporting informationsystems in a systematic way on the other side, the need for a closer link between relevant theoriesand successful practices for the design of enterprise information systems becomes evident. Theaim of the reported research is to provide such a link by means of prescriptive guidelines for theclass of problems concerning the reverse engineering of organisations. The reverse engineering oforganisations aims at deriving at the ontological models of organisations, which build the basis forthe design and engineering of information systems supporting the business needs. An ontologicalmodel as used in the presented research is defined as the highest-level constructional model of anorganisation, which is fully independent of its implementation. The prescriptive guidelines forreverse engineering presented in this paper are derived from the ?-theory (the Greek letter ? ispronounced PSI, which stands for Performance in Social Interaction), the theory that underliesthe notion of Enterprise Ontology. This theory regards organisations as social systems and sees ITsystems as support for social actors in performing coordination-related activities and productionrelatedactivities. In this paper we focus specifically on recommendations based on the ?-theoryconcerning the coupling of two types of enterprise models in order to derive at ontological modelsof organisations. The first type of models are derived by applying the Design and EngineeringMethodology for Organisations (DEMO) and the second type of models are derived by applying theArchitecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS).