In the organization architecture, the organizational structures of the company are described. A typical way of representing organizational structures is the organizational chart. According to the selected structuring criteria it shows existing organizational units as task performers and the links between them.
Definition
Organizational units are the performers of the tasks required to achieve the business objectives.
Organizational units are linked via relationships. For a more precise specification of how organizational units are arranged in a hierarchy, different types of connections are available to interlink them. In this context, a connection may have one of the following meanings:
If functional responsibilities are recorded the organizational chart illustrates the assignment of the business tasks.
The Position object type is provided to represent individual positions within the company, for example, positions for which descriptions exist. An organizational unit can be assigned multiple positions. Connections illustrate how organizational units interact. Individual persons can be assigned to these positions and organizational units. Specific objects are also available for persons. The assignment of an individual person to an organizational unit shows that this person is an employee of this organizational unit, whereas the assignment to an individual position defines the current staffing in the company.
Organizational units and persons can be typified. It is therefore possible to define for an organizational unit whether it is a department, subdepartment, or group, for example. Persons, in turn, can be assigned to the Departmental manager, Group manager, or Project manager roles, for example.
This typification is represented by the Organizational unit type and Roles objects provided for this purpose. These object types can be used to map general business rules that abstract from concrete organizational units or persons within the company. Thus, it is possible to define in process chains that only specific roles may carry out a function or have access to an information object.
Modeling the organizational structure of the company is the starting point for defining the network topologies at the design specification level that are to provide the best possible support for this organizational structure. Included in the definition of the network topology are network connections and network nodes, which may be found at particular locations of the company. The location of an organizational unit is therefore the most important link between requirements definition and design specification of the organization view. Thus, the location of every organizational unit can already be defined in the requirements definition.
Locations may be arranged in any required hierarchy. A location can be an entire plant, a building or, at a more detailed level, an office or even an individual workstation within an office. This makes it possible, in the design specification, to assign network nodes of a network to individual workstations of the organizational unit.
When creating process support maps, organizational charts are specified in the selection dialogs as the source for the organizational structure, that is, for the rows in the map. The order in which the rows are created in the process support map is subject to a specific convention that should be observed when creating organizational charts. The figure below shows the read direction the algorithm uses to fill the selection lists in the dialogs for creating a process support map.
ARIS first extracts the root objects of the Organizational unit or Location type from a left-aligned column from top to bottom. It then searches horizontally for the root - again of the Organizational unit type - of the next column and extracts the column from top to bottom, etc. Finally, connected locations are extracted in the same order.
Further information on the organization architecture is available in the ARIS Methods Manual.