Formal modelling of organisational goals based on performance indicators

Every organisation exists or is created for the achievement of one or more goals. To ensure continued success, the organisation should monitor its performance with respect to the formulated goals. In practice the performance of an organisation is often evaluated by estimating its performance indicators. In most existing approaches for organisation modelling the relation between performance indicators and goals remains implicit. This paper proposes a formal framework for modelling goals based on performance indicators and defines mechanisms for establishing goal satisfaction, which enable evaluation of organisational performance. Methodological and analysis issues related to goals are also discussed in the paper. The described framework is a part of a general framework for organisation modelling and analysis.     

A fuzzy model for competency-based employee evaluation and selection

The employee evaluation and selection system is an important problem that can significantly affect the future competitiveness and the performance of an organization. This paper presents a comprehensive hierarchical structure for selecting and evaluating a right employee. The structure can systematically build the goals of employee selection to carry out the business goals and strategies of an organization, identify the suitable factor and measure indicators, and set up a consistent evaluation standard for facilitating a decision process. The process of matching an employee with a certain job is performed through a competency-based fuzzy model. An example demonstrates the feasibility of the presented framework.     

MetricM: a modeling method in support of the reflective design and use of performance measurement systems

Performance indicators play a key role in management practice. The existence of a coherent and consistent set of performance indicators is widely regarded as a prerequisite to making informed decisions in line with set objectives of the firm. Designing such a system of performance indicators requires a profound understanding of the relations between financial and non-financial metrics, organizational goals, aspired decision scenarios, and the relevant organizational context—including subtleties resulting from implicit assumptions and hidden agendas potentially leading to dysfunctional consequences connected with the ill-informed use of performance indicators. In this paper, we investigate whether a domain-specific modeling method can address requirements essential to the reflective design of performance measurement systems, and which structural and procedural features such a method entails. The research follows a design research process in which we describe a research artifact, and evaluate it to assess whether it meets intended goals and domain requirements. In the paper, we specify design goals, requirements and assumptions underlying the method construction, discuss the structural specification of the method and its design rationale, and provide an initial method evaluation. The results indicate that the modeling method satisfies the requirements of the performance measurement domain, and that such a method contributes to the reflective definition and interpretation of performance measurement systems.     

Fuzzy-based sustainability evaluation method for manufacturing SMEs using balanced scorecard framework

Sustainability has become a necessity, partly due to the threats created by traditional manufacturing practices, and due to regulations imposed by stakeholders. Performance evaluation is an important component of sustainability initiatives in manufacturing organizations. This study proposes a sustainability evaluation method for manufacturing SMEs using integrated fuzzy analytical hierarchal process (FAHP) and fuzzy inference system (FIS) approach. The performance indicators are identified from literature considering the characteristics of SMEs. Balanced scorecard framework is used to categorize the indicators among its four aspects. The linguistic variables are used to collect the opinions of decision makers about the performance ratings and importance of the aspects and corresponding indicators. The FAHP method is applied to determine the relative weights of measures and indicators. The performance ratings of the organization with respect to indicators and relative weights of indicators are combined to obtain the weighted performance ratings. The weighted performance ratings are considered as inputs to FIS. The hierarchal FIS is applied to derive the overall sustainability performance. Using a case study of manufacturing SME, the sustainability score of the organization was elicited in accordance with this procedure. Consequently, a sensitivity analysis of the proposed method reveals the most important basic indicators affecting overall sustainability, identifying areas which decision makers should place special attention. This method can also assist managers of larger enterprises to assess the effectiveness of their sustainability strategies, especially when dealing with suppliers from the SMEs.     

Investigating business-IT alignment through multi-disciplinary goal concepts

The alignment of information technology (IT) with business strategies is optimal when harmony exists between organizational and system goals. Empirical evidence reveals that effective strategic alignment leads to superior financial performance for organizations. This observation has spurred extensive research into business-IT alignment. Yet, the issue of alignment remains a top concern for CIOs. We argue that the parochial view undertaken by past research into business-IT alignment is a probable cause for continuing system failures. Furthermore, strategic alignment research is limited and devoid within the requirements engineering discipline. In this paper, we highlight existing shortfalls of research in business-IT alignment, and bring to light insights that may be offered by other disciplines to augment this field. Subscribing to a multi-disciplinary perspective, we develop a goal-based framework that incorporates goals from various literatures in investigating business-IT alignment. One of the novelties of our proposed framework lies in its delineation between goals that have been originally assigned to stakeholders versus those interpreted by stakeholders. Additionally, the framework includes constructs at the strategic level for supporting the rationale of strategic level goals. We tested the usefulness and usability of this methodology in an organization with a newly developed information system founded on strategic business goals and reported lessons learnt from both researchers’ and practitioners’ perspectives.     

一种基于内部威胁的需求分析架构

本论文从企业目标或商业任务角度,提出了一个基于内部威胁的需求采集框架。该框架包含了一个内部威胁识别和估方法,以及抵御风险的需求启发方法。最后,描述了组织系统防御需求的收集方法。     

Simulation-based workforce assignment in a multi-organizational social network for alliance-based software development

The development of alliance-based software requires the collaboration of many stakeholders. These different stakeholders across multiple organizations form a complex social network. The goal of this paper is to develop a novel modeling framework, which will help task managers devise optimal workforce assignments considering both short-term and long-term aspects of the software development process. The proposed framework is composed of an assignment module and a prediction module. For a given task, the assignment module first selects a candidate workforce mix. Based on the candidate workforce mix, the prediction module then predicts the short-term performance (productivity) as well as the long-term performance (workforce training and robustness of the organization) of the organization. Then, the assignment module selects another candidate mix, and this iteration continues until an optimal workforce mix is found. The prediction module and the assignment module are based on an agent-based simulation method and a multi-objective optimization model, respectively. The proposed modeling framework is illustrated with a software enhancement request process in Kuali, an alliance-based open source software development project involving 12 organizations. The constructed framework is executed with varying parameters to demonstrate its use and benefit in the software enhancement process.     

短生命周期产品的供应链仿真框架

文章提出了短生命周期产品的供应链管理的概念,介绍了这种供应链的特点和在管理中存在的问题。在分析其重点过程、性能指标、仿真参数的基础上,给出了短生命周期产品供应链管理的仿真框架,并针对其仿真特点和要求,研究了具有Petri网和面向对象技术特点的复合建模仿真技术。最后以服装业为例,给出了仿真实例。     

Adaptive large eddy simulation

Several a posteriori indicators in the framework of local grid adaptation and large eddy simulation (LES) are evaluated. In LES indicators must be capable to bound not only the discretisation error, but also the modeling error. Moreover, the numerical method must be able to adapt the computational grid dynamically, as the regions requiring different resolution are not static. The performance of different indicators is evaluated in two flow configurations. It turns out that the classic residual based error indicator and the newly introduced heuristic indicator perform best.     

A view framework for modeling and change validation of artifact-centric inter-organizational business processes

Over the past several years, more efficient approaches have been on increasing demands for designing, modeling, and implementing inter-organizational business processes. In the process collaboration across organizational boundaries, organizations still stay autonomic, which means each organization can freely modify its internal operations to meet its private goals while satisfying the mutual objectives with its partners. Recently, artifact-centric process modeling has been evidenced with higher flexibility in process modeling and execution than traditional activity-centric modeling methods. Although some efforts have been put to exploring how artifact-centric modeling facilitates the collaboration between organizations, the achievement is still far from satisfaction level, particularly in aspects of process modeling and validating. To fill in the gaps, we propose a view framework for modeling and validating the changes of inter-organizational business processes. The framework consists of an artifact-centric process meta-model, public view constructing mechanism, and private view and change validating mechanisms, which are specially designed to facilitate the participating organizations to customize their internal operations while ensuring the correctness of the collaborating processes. We also implement a software tool named Artifact-M to help organizations to automatically construct a minimal and consistent public view from their processes.     

Strategic business modeling: representation and reasoning

Business intelligence (BI) offers tremendous potential for business organizations to gain insights into their day-to-day operations, as well as longer term opportunities and threats. However, most of today’s BI tools are based on models that are too much data-oriented from the point of view of business decision makers. We propose an enterprise modeling approach to bridge the business-level understanding of the enterprise with its representations in databases and data warehouses. The business intelligence model (BIM) offers concepts familiar to business decision making—such as goals, strategies, processes, situations, influences, and indicators. Unlike many enterprise models which are meant to be used to derive, manage, or align with IT system implementations, BIM aims to help business users organize and make sense of the vast amounts of data about the enterprise and its external environment. In this paper, we present core BIM concepts, focusing especially on reasoning about situations, influences, and indicators. Such reasoning supports strategic analysis of business objectives in light of current enterprise data, allowing analysts to explore scenarios and find alternative strategies. We describe how goal reasoning techniques from conceptual modeling and requirements engineering have been applied to BIM. Techniques are also provided to support reasoning with indicators linked to business metrics, including cases where specifications of indicators are incomplete. Evaluation of the proposed modeling and reasoning framework includes an on-going prototype implementation, as well as case studies.     

Understanding quality in conceptual modeling

With the increasing focus on early development as a major factor in determining overall quality, many researchers are trying to define what makes a good conceptual model. However, existing frameworks often do little more than list desirable properties. The authors examine attempts to define quality as it relates to conceptual models and propose their own framework, which includes a systematic approach to identifying quality-improvement goals and the means to achieve them. The framework has two unique features: it distinguishes between goals and means by separating what you are trying to achieve in conceptual modeling from how to achieve it (it has been made so that the goals are more realistic by introducing the notion of feasibility); and it is closely linked to linguistic concepts because modeling is essentially making statements in some language     

From event logs to goals: a systematic literature review of goal-oriented process mining

Process mining helps infer valuable insights about business processes using event logs, whereas goal modeling focuses on the representation and analysis of competing goals of stakeholders and systems. Although there are clear benefits in mining the goals of existing processes, goal-oriented approaches that consider logs during model construction are still rare. Process mining techniques, when generalizing large instance-level data into process models, can be considered as a data-driven complement to use case/scenario elicitation. Requirements engineers can exploit process mining techniques to find new system or process requirements in order to align current practices and desired ones. This paper provides a systemic literature review, based on 24 papers rigorously selected from four popular search engines in 2018, to assess the state of goal-oriented process mining. Through two research questions, the review highlights that the use of process mining in association with goals does not yet have a coherent line of research, whereas intention mining (where goal models are mined) shows a meaningful trace of research. Research about performance indicators measuring goals associated with process mining is also sparse. Although the number of publications in process mining and goal modeling is trending up, goal mining and goal-oriented process mining remain modest research areas. Yet, synergetic effects achievable by combining goals and process mining can potentially augment the precision, rationality and interpretability of mined models and eventually improve opportunities to satisfy system stakeholders.

     

Developing strategic measurement and improvement for the biopharmaceutical firm: Using the BSC hierarchy

The balanced scorecard (BSC) provides an enterprise view of an organization’s overall performance. It integrates financial measures with other key performance indicators around customer perspectives, internal business processes, and organizational growth, learning, and innovation. The strategy planning is a virtual necessity for business activities, and this paper presents the use of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) to prioritize all of the measures and strategies in a BSC framework. This study has found related strategies and objectives from four perspectives of balanced scorecard. This case illustrates selection or design of the most appropriate and helpful measures of the BSC in the pharmaceutical firm in an emerging market.     

Performance optimization of pharmaceutical supply chain by a unique resilience engineering and fuzzy mathematical framework

Pharmaceutical supply chains (PSCs) are responsible for guaranteeing that the right people receive the right medication at the right time and in the right conditions. These responsibilities make PSC very complex and subsequently increase their vulnerability and disturbance probability. Resilience engineering (RE) can enable supply chain managers to cope with disruptions and to help them maintain their efficient performance. This study proposes a unique RE framework for performance optimization of the pharmaceutical sector in a veterinary organization. A standard questionnaire was used to collect the required data. Next, data envelopment analysis (DEA) and fuzzy data envelopment analysis (FDEA) approaches were employed to formulate the problem. Sensitivity analysis was performed based on the most appropriate model of DEA and FDEA. The results showed that redundancy was the most effective factor in enhancing efficiency in PSCs in the veterinary organization. This is one of the first studies that investigate the influence of resilience indicators on PSC through DEA/FDEA and statistical methods.     

Emergent patterns in agent-environment interactions and their roles in supporting agile spatial skills

This paper provides a review of the analysis and modeling of human spatial planning, perception, and learning based on the dynamics of agent-environment interactions. The approach stems from an analysis and modeling framework that was previously conceived using interaction patterns emerging from system-wide interactions as the basic unit of analysis. The paper first discusses the rationals for using patterns in agent-environment interactions as units of organization of behavior, and as functional units of the modeling framework. These concepts are then illustrated through two applications using experimental data from a first-person flight simulator that implements agile obstacle navigation tasks. The first application focuses on the analysis of the formation and evolution of interaction patterns over successive trials, and the use of these patterns as basic elements of the task environment representation, enabling the evaluation of the learning process and assessment of the operator performance. The second application focuses on the analysis of interaction patterns as functional units supporting the modeling of the underlying perceptual guidance and control mechanisms. These examples demonstrate the relevance of dynamics in agent-environment interactions for studying a wide range of functions across the human control hierarchy.     

So, You Think You Know Others' Goals? A Repertory Grid Study

Recent research in requirements engineering (RE) has generated a number of notations for modeling stakeholders' goals and the relationships between them. However, the community has paid little attention to how stakeholders can develop consensus on the meaning of the goals in a goal model. In this article, we show how to use the repertory grid technique (RGT) to compare stakeholders' terms when they describe their softgoals (goals whose satisfaction can't be established in a clear-cut sense). We conducted a pilot study for a nonprofit organization to demonstrate our approach. The study shows that the technique can readily identify agreements and mismatches in stakeholders' terminologies and can be performed without preliminary training or specific resources     

Recent developments in the organization goals conformance using ontology

Organizational goals serve as the most important achievement target in every organization. Even though some researchers have developed the concept of the organization goals, but structuring the organization goals model is always questionable by the way it is being used. In this paper, we propose ontology to develop a unified model for the organization goals structure. We review the recent literature on the organization modelling and ontology development as an effort to evaluate the organization goals using a metrics for the achievement of the organization goals. We suggest that the metrics is important to identify the relevant organization data in relation to the organization goals conformance. In order to achieve this purpose, we investigate various associated concepts and organize the literature based on the organization goals, organization ontology and metrics model. We observe our proposed models are important for domain experts and entrepreneurs to evaluate the relevant organization data and to assist them in decision making. In summary, the contribution of this survey may serve as a first step in understanding the evaluation of the organization data for the achievement of the organization goals.     

Representing and using nonfunctional requirements: aprocess-oriented approach

A comprehensive framework for representing and using nonfunctional requirements during the development process is proposed. The framework consists of five basic components which provide the representation of nonfunctional requirements in terms of interrelated goals. Such goals can be refined through refinement methods and can be evaluated in order to determine the degree to which a set of nonfunctional requirements is supported by a particular design. Evidence for the power of the framework is provided through the study of accuracy and performance requirements for information systems     

A framework for empirical evaluation of conceptual modeling techniques

The paper presents a framework for the empirical evaluation of conceptual modeling techniques used in requirements engineering. The framework is based on the notion that modeling techniques should be compared via their underlying grammars. The framework identifies two types of dimensions in empirical comparisons—affecting and affected dimensions. The affecting dimensions provide guidance for task definition, independent variables and controls, while the affected dimensions define the possible mediating variables and dependent variables. In particular, the framework addresses the dependence between the modeling task—model creation and model interpretation—and the performance measures of the modeling grammar. The utility of the framework is demonstrated by using it to categorize existing work on evaluating modeling techniques. The paper also discusses theoretical foundations that can guide hypothesis generation and measurement of variables. Finally, the paper addresses possible levels for categorical variables and ways to measure interval variables, especially the grammar performance measures.