From Unknown to Known Impacts of Organizational Changes on Socio-technical Systems

Keeping organizations and their Socio-technical System (STS) aligned over time is a complex endeavour. We believe understanding the organ- izational dynamics of changes, and of the impacts these changes will have, can support the evolution of STSs. Reasoning on the organizational changes in ad- vance also supports the development of an STS more likely to be aligned to the dynamics of the organization. This work presents the design and the application of a Dynamic Organizational Framework (DOF), constituted of a dynamic or- ganizational model (DOM) on which to base the reasoning, a database of ques- tions (DBQ) to explore possible organizational impacts, and a method to reason on changes and impacts within goal models. We apply this framework to ana- lyse the impacts of the introduction of a system into the customers' attendance process in a Post Office in London. First results show contributions towards to the awareness about the organization, and to the quality and accuracy of re- quirements.