Control Organization: A DEMO Based Specification and Extension

In this paper we apply the Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO), to specify an ontological model for the generic Control Organization that we argue that exists in every organization. With our proposal, DEMO is extended so that we can specify critical properties of an organization – that we call measures – whose value must respect certain restrictions imposed by other properties of the organization – that we call viability norms. We can now also precisely specify defined resilience strategies that control and eliminate dysfunctions – violations of viability norms caused byexceptions. On top of this, we can also keep a systematic trace of the history of dysfunctions of an organization and of control acts executed to eliminate them. All of these facts are structured in a systematic manner and provided in a set of proposed tables, which are useful for a variety of purposes like (1) making control responsibilities clear and making organization agents accountable for bad control decisions, as well as (2) allowing more informed organization change decisions.

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