Towards Organizational Modules and Patterns based on Normalized Systems Theory

摘要

Normalized Systems Theory provides prescriptive guidance on how to design modular software structures so that they exhibit a high degree of evolvability and low degree of diagnostic complexity. The theory basically suggests to first break up the modular structure in a very fine-grained way based on "concerns" (in terms of change drivers or information units) and then aggregate these concerns in a structured way into patterns or "Elements". While the relevance of this theory for analyzing and designing organizational artefacts has been shown previously, only the first step of the reasoning has already been performed in the past, i.e., identifying a set of organizational concerns to be separated. In this paper, a first attempt to proceed to the second step (i.e., aggregating concerns into organizational "Elements") is proposed. We formulate some meta-requirements for such organizational Elements (i.e., having exhaustive interfaces, aggregating several basic constructs into one "Element" as well as including and identifying a relevant set of cross-cutting concerns). We also propose a tentative set of five organizational Elements: Party, Product or Service, Compensation, Work Unit and Asset or Resource. The relevance of these Elements is shown by briefly discussing some (theoretical) illustrations.