Designing Agile Organisations Essay -- Enterprise integration modellin

Abstract: We investigate the management system of the enterprise as an agent maintaining a system of objectives. We then analyse the organisation as a set of individual autonomous co-operating agents so that agenthood of the entire enterprise becomes an emergent property of the organisation. Important questions include: under what condition can agenthood emerge? how to create such an organisation?, and how to guarantee that change preserves agenthood?. Introduction It is increasingly important to devise faster and more reliable ways of designing purposeful, agile organisations (Bernus et al, 1997). We use the definition of the organisation as the human component of the enterprise, forming the human-organisational architecture (Williams, 1994). An enterprise can be thought of as consisting of an operational and a decisional system (Doumeingts et al, 1998), each implemented partly by humans and partly by machines (Bernus and Nemes, 1994). We borrow the definition of the 'planning agent' from artificial intelligence to describe the desired quality of the organisation. We demonstrate necessary conditions for the enterprise to behave as an agent, and also show the relationship of this view to concepts such as the fractal factory, holonic manufacturing, and others. The organisation as an agent Two crucial questions in organisational design are: 1) how to design the task structure of the enterprise to form a co-ordinated whole? and 2) what tasks allocation to humans (or groups) ensures that the enterprise will act to satisfy its objectives? The second question is typically not asked in business process engineering: it is assumed that the organisation will to what it is told to. An organisation should conduct a system of activities managed and controlled to satisfy a set of organisational objectives. This requires purposeful behaviour so that the organisation can be characterised as a planning agent. A planning agent determines a course of action to achieve its set of objectives. This course of action, or plan, is constrained by the agent's resources as well as the agent's own functional capabilities. The organisation follows, or appears to be following this plan while monitoring the effectiveness of the actions to actually satisfy the objectives for which the plan was made. If the plan fails in some way, then the plan or the objectives are m... ...319-332 Koestler,A.. (1989) The ghost in the machine. Arkana Books Tharumarajah, A., Wells,J., Nemes,L., (1996) Comparison of the bionic, fractal and holonic manufacturing systems concepts. Int. J. on Computer Integrated Manuf. (3) pp.217-226 Uppington,G., Bernus,P., Assessing the Necessity of Enterprise Change: Pre-feasibility and Feasibility Studies in Enterprise Integration. Int. J. of CIM, 1998 11(5) pp 430-447 Valckenaers,P., VanBrussel,H., Bongaerts,L., Wyns,J. (1997) IMS test case 5: holonic manufacturing systems. Journal of Integrated Computer-Aided Engineering, 4(3), pp191-201. VanHouten,D.R. (1990) The political economy and technical control of work humanization in Sweden during the 1970s and 1980s. Work and Occupations, 14, pp483-513. Warnecke, H.J. (1993) The Fractal Company. Berlin: Springer. Williams,T.J., (1994) The Purdue Enterprise Reference Architecture. Computers in Industry, 24 (2-3) pp141-158 Williams,T.J., Bernus,P., Brosvic,J., Chen,D., Doumeingts,G., Nemes,L., Nevins,J.L., Vallespir,B., Vlietstra,J., Zoetekouw,D., (1994) Architectures for integrating manufacturing activities and enterprises. Computers in Industry, 24(2-3) pp111-140