Organisational design and engineering: proposal of a conceptual framework and comparison of business engineering with other approaches

摘要

Organisational design and engineering (ODE) is an emerging discipline that aims at replacing intuitive 'handcrafting' of enterprises by a systematic, model and method driven approach. In line with this goal various approaches have been proposed. Due to a missing framework, these approaches are hard to compare due to different terminology, focus, construction direction, genericity, and other aspects. In order to better compare and integrate approaches for ODE, a set of characteristics is proposed. As a hierarchical, iterative approach for the situational design of 'business-to-IT' solutions, the business engineering approach is described using the proposed characteristics. In order to validate the characteristics' utility to frame ODE approaches, we also describe enterprise engineering, the work system approach and business process reengineering on that foundation. The paper closes with implications arising from this comparison.