Organ Des Enterp Eng (2017) 1:13–20DOI 10.1007/s41251-016-0002-z

COMMENT ON EDITORIAL PAPER

A work system perspective on organizational designand enterprise engineering

Steven Alter1

Received: 27 August 2015 / Accepted: 25 June 2016 / Published online: 20 January 2017© Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016

Abstract This paper explains how organizational design/enterprise engineering can be viewed as an operational worksystem that produces designs, models, and/or specificationsalong with the related understandings, discussions, and com-mitments. It applies a work system lens to visualize a typicalwork system that performs organizational design/ enterpriseengineering. It uses the same lens to identify possibilities forresearch on the related topics.

Keywords Organizational design · Enterprise engineering ·Work system ·Work system method

Introduction: elaborating on the Editorial’s pro-posed directions for OD&EE

This brief paper responds to the Editorial [6] at the begin-ning of this issue of OD&EE. The Editorial proposes thebeginnings of new conceptual underpinnings for OD&EE’scontent in the future. This paper uses a work system lens tointegrate some of the topics emphasized by the Editorial andto elaborate on possible directions implied by the Editorial.

This paper proceeds as follows: first it identifies some ofthe main points in the Editorial and argues that those pointscould be integrated more fully by considering the opera-tional systems that would actually perform organizationaldesign and enterprise engineering (OD/EE). To summarizethe essence of those operational systems, it assumes that

This comment refers to the editorial paper available atdoi:10.1007/s41251-016-0005-9.

B Steven Alteralter@usfca.edu

1 University of San Francisco, San Francisco, USA

organizational design and organizational engineering over-lap substantially. It presents a work system interpretation ofOD/EE that focuses on the process of producing organiza-tional designs, models, and/or specifications along with therelated discussions and commitments. It provides a brief dis-cussion of individual elements of operational OD/EE worksystems, such as steps in the process, participants, infor-mation, and technologies used. Next it uses the same worksystem approach and format to identify important researchissues related to individual elements of operational OD/EEwork systems. It identifies important special cases that arerevealed in the exploration of those elements, such as orga-nizational designs that emerge over time, secondary design,necessarily incomplete partial design of organizations thatcross enterprises (e.g., supply chains), highly informal mod-els such as those produced using the business model canvas,and so on. In summary, this paper identifies many valuablepossibilities for future OD&EE content that could focus onOD/EE work systems, on individual elements of OD/EEwork systems, and on special cases of OD/EE work systems.

Extending the main ideas in the Editorial

The Editorial presents a number of important ideas relatedto OD/EE in general and to the future content of OD&EE.Those ideas include the following:

• No strict distinction between design and engineeringThis paper supports the Editorial’s view that distinguish-ing strictly between organizational design and organiza-tional engineering is not particularly helpful. It assumesthat such distinctions are of less practical interest thanunderstanding the work and results of designing and/orengineering organizations.

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• Organization design as “an emergent and never end-ing process” This paper agrees with the Editorial’s viewof organization design as “an architecture of collabora-tion… expressed not as configurations of organizationalstructures but as sets of principles which actors followwhen engaging in organizational relationships”. Moregenerally, an obviously worthwhile emphasis on con-scious design and engineering in OD/EE should not leadto ignoring the possibility and significance of endoge-nous change in organizations that is not based on defineddesign/engineering processes.

• Importance of participants and other stakeholdersOD/EE is not just about producing designs or speci-fications. The practical application of OD/EE requiresdesign/engineering processes that involve executives,managers, and other stakeholders of the organization thatis being designed or engineered.

• Centrality of models This paper accepts the idea thatOD/EE calls for creating and using explicit models oforganizations. It also notes that many types of modelsmay be relevant. Some of thosemodels may be expressedin relatively simple textual and tabular formats that areeasy to understand. Other models may be highly com-plex and may be expressed through graphical formatsand abstract concepts that are used by researchers, con-sultants, or IT professionals but are not familiar to mostbusiness professionals. Themost rigorousmodelsmay beused for testing consistency or even for computer simu-lations.

• Use of models as boundary objects An essential partof OD/EE is the use of models as boundary objects tofacilitate communication and collaboration between peo-ple involved in OD/EE, including designer/engineers,executives, managers, and other stakeholders. Accord-ingly, the Editorial notes that “it is important to respectthe language of the stakeholders” during collabora-tive design sessions. This paper explores some of theimplications of treating models as boundaryobjects.

Although theEditorial points to new and important directionssuch as those listed above, in my opinion it does not providea complete view of how those topics and other importanttopics can be integrated into a perspective on operationalsystems that actually perform the work of OD/EE. Thispaper uses a work system lens based on [3,4] to providethat type of integrated perspective. Aspects of that approachappeared previously in [2], which proposed a set of worksystem-inspired design spaces for OD/EE. The current paperfocuses specifically on extending the topics in the currentEditorial.

1 How is organizational design/engineeringperformed?

This paper treats OD/EE as awork system to bemore focusedand more specific than the Editorial’s broad ranging cover-age of many important aspects of OD/EE. A work system isa system in which human participants and/or machines per-form processes and activities using information, technology,and other resources to produce product/services for internalor external customers. Enterprises that grow beyond a largelyimprovised start-upphase canbeviewedas consistingofmul-tiple work systems, e.g., work systems that procure materialsfrom suppliers, produce products, deliver products, find cus-tomers, and so on [3,4]. OD/EE can be viewed as one of thosework systems in organizations that perform some combina-tion of organizational design and organizational engineering.

Creating a generic summary of an OD/EE work systemapplies work system concepts to be somewhat explicit aboutwhat OD/EE means in practice. Table 1 summarizes what Iassume is a generic OD/EE work system, i.e., a typical sce-nario in which an organization’s employees and contractorswork together to produce and use a situation-specific modelthat is developed and maintained for the purpose of OD/EE.

Table 1 takes the format of an extended version of a“work system snapshot”, a basic tool used in the work sys-tem method for describing, analyzing, and designing worksystems [1,3]. It provides an overview of the people who dothe work, the processes they perform, the information andtechnology they use, the product/services they produce, andthe customers who receive and use those product/services.Producing basic agreement about those six elements is, espe-cially important at the beginning of almost any analysis anddesign effort because it minimizes confusion about exactlywhat is being analyzed and whether the system of interest isactually an independent work system, an information systemthat supports the work system, or technology that is used in awork system. As the analysis unfolds, it is also important tolook at three other elements of the work system framework,which is the conceptual basis of the work system snapshot.As shown at the bottom of Table 1, those elements are thesurrounding environment, the relevant infrastructure, and anystrategies that are relevant.

Starting with the participants, Table 1 says executivesand managers, designers/engineers, other stakeholders, andmodeling experts work together to produce models for orga-nizational design/ engineering, to obtain results by analyzingmodels and possibly simulation runs of models, and to gen-erate understandings and commitments using those models.The customers for that effort are the executives and man-agers who need to determine the organization’s plans for thefuture, plus systems analysts and enterprise architects, whoneed to align current and future operational work systemsand IT systems within any agreed vision and mission for

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Table 1 Work system snapshotof a typical work system fororganizationaldesign/engineering

the organization. The information that is used includes goalsof the OD/EE effort, organizational issues and challenges,measures of organizational performance, descriptions of theorganization’s formal and/or informal structure, and oftentacit knowledge about organizational culture, belief systems,and politics. The most interesting technology in OD/EE isthe models that are used. Uses of typical office and commu-nication technologies are less noteworthy.

It is possible, and even likely that some readers will havea different view of what constitutes a generic OD/EE worksystem. For example, the generic view of OD/EE in Table 1assumes that the model would probably be complex enoughto require genuine expertise in modeling tools and meth-ods. Those tools and methods might describe relationshipsbetween organizations and their customers, internal opera-

tions and relationships within organizations, or relationshipsbetween IT capabilities and business capabilities. That levelof expertise will not be required if the modeling within theOD/EE effort is restricted to relatively simple methods suchas displaying and organizing post-it notes on whiteboards,using the business model canvas [7], or using a work sys-tem snapshot like Table 1 to describe how an organizationoperates or might operate.

At this point in this brief paper, we take for granted thatTable 1 is a reasonable summary representation of an oper-ational OD/EE work system. At some point in the future itmight be interesting to explore whether readers accept thatview as typical.

We look at each element in Table 1 in turn, starting therow for participants, information, and technologies.

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1.1 Participants

Participants in an OD/EE s work system are the people whoperform at least some of thework of producing that work sys-tem’s product/services. The generic view in Table 1 assumesthat designers or engineers do some of the work and thatexecutives, managers, and other stakeholders are involved. Itincludes the possibility that modeling experts will be needed.

1.2 Information

The information in the OD/EE work system includes goalsfor the OD/EE effort, organizational issues and challengesthat should be reflected in the OD/EE effort, measures oforganizational performance, and a description of the orga-nization’s main processes and structure. A description ofthe organization’s current structure will be irrelevant if theOD/EE effort is for an organization that does not yet exist.

1.3 Technologies

Technologies in an OD/EE work system might be anythingfrom a textual model such as a one-page business modelcanvas through an Archimate model, a multi-layer IT model,or a simulation model that is used interactively. The modelcould describe anything from interactions between groupsof people through formally defined business processes ororganizational structures.

Thinking of models as OD/EE boundary objects requiresat least one step in thework system snapshot inwhichmodelsare used collaboratively. Thinking of models as boundaryobjects presents a special challenge when the participants inthe OD/EE effort work in different disciplines. The generalproblem of working across disciplines is widely recognized,going back at least as far as C.P. Snow’s [8] discussion ofthe sciences and the humanities as two separate cultures inmodern society.

1.4 Major activities and processes

The generic view of OD/EE in Table 1 assumes that OD/EEstarts with some kind of executive charter for perform-ing OD/EE activities, followed by an information gatheringphase, an information verification phase involving discus-sions with relevant stakeholders, a modeling phase, and thenvarious uses of the model. The underlying assumption is thatthe OD/EE effort will involve a formal model that only canbe developed by designers, engineers, or modeling experts.OD/EE efforts that focus on developing initial ideas aboutthe business model of a new enterprise probably would callfor different assumptions, especially if those efforts followthe notion (cited in the Editorial) that use of “Post-Its andBrown-Paper makes collaborative modeling more engaging

to stakeholders than the use of graphical models on computerscreens”.

1.5 Product/services

The most tangible product/service produced by an OD/EEwork system is a design or blueprint. If the effort is morein the realm of organizational design, this product/servicewould probably be called “the design”. If the effort is seen asorganizational engineering, this product/service would prob-ably be called a blueprint or specification.

An important outcome of the process of producing anorganizational design, blueprint, or specification is personalandmutual understandings aboutwhat the organization is andhow it should operate. Ideally, those understandings shouldbe shared as agreements or commitments. Seeing OD/EEefforts as incomplete unless agreements or commitments areproduced is important because of the danger of producingmodels that are never used for any important purpose.

1.6 Customers

OD/EE’s customers are the people who will use whateveris produced by an OD/EE effort. Obviously there shouldbe a match between the form and content of the OD/EEproduct/services and the characteristics and goals of thecustomers. In particular, a complex mathematical modelor IT-focused specification might not suit the understand-ings and interests of executives and managers who wouldbe responsible for investing in any changes implied by theOD/EE effort.

1.7 Environment

The surroundingorganizational environment includes the rel-evant organizational, cultural, competitive, technical, regula-tory, and demographic environment within which the OD/EEwork system operates, and that affects its effectiveness andefficiency. Organizational aspects of the environment includestakeholders, policies and procedures, and organizationalhistory and politics, all of which have direct impacts onwhether OD/EE is likely to have significant impact. In anextremely turbulent environment, it is impractical to spend agreat deal of time developing models that may be obsoletea month in the future. Developing extensive models makesmore sense in a comparatively stable environment.

1.8 Infrastructure

Relevant infrastructure for OD/EE includes aspects of sharedhuman, informational, and technical infrastructure. Each ofthose can have an important impact on the outcome. Forexample, it is less likely that model-based OD/EE will be

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handled well if the enterprise or organization has inadequatehuman resources such asmodeling experts, inadequate infor-mational resources such as readily available enterprise data,or inadequate technical resources such asmodeling software.

1.9 Strategies

Ideally, enterprise, organization, and department strategiesshould be somewhat consistent with the strategy for creatingand operating the OD/EE work system. Insufficient align-ment between the strategies makes it unlikely that OD/EEwill be attempted seriously, or, if attempted, will have sig-nificant impact.

2 OD/EE research topics based on a work systemview of OD/EE

Table 2 uses the same format as Table 1, but in this instanceuses the nine elements to identify research topics related toOD/EE. Notice how each of the nine elements can serve asa focal point for research topics related to those elements.

2.1 Application to OD/EE case studies

Research on specific OD/EE work systems in operationcan be executed through action research or as retrospec-tive research based on interviews of participants and otherstakeholders. In either case, the essence of the operationalsystem can be summarized using the format of Table 1, andthe research questions in Table 2 might help in identifyinginteresting topics to explore.

2.2 Evaluation of OD/EE work systems

Separate consideration of the various elements of an opera-tional OD/EEwork system implies a series of research topicsrelated to the evaluation of OD/EE work systems. For exam-ple, product/services produced by an OD/EE work systemcan be evaluated in relation to quality, total cost to customer(e.g., salary of designer/engineers or amount of executivetime that is absorbed), reliability, and responsiveness to theirconcerns. The processes and activities can be evaluated inrelation to typical measures such as efficiency, speed, errors,and rework. The information that is used and created canbe evaluated in relation to accuracy, precision, source, anddurability. Alignment with the surrounding environment canbe discussed in relation to consistency with organizationalculture, policies, and politics.

3 Important special cases and valuable focal points

There are a number of important special cases that should berecognized as belonging within the realm of OD/EE. Thesespecial cases raise issues that go beyond typical issues relatedto different types ofOD/EEwork systems and different formsof evaluation for such systems.

3.1 New enterprises

OD/EE research should distinguish between OD/EE relatedto new enterprises versus OD/EE related to improving theperformance of existing enterprises. Much of the extensiveattention to business models focuses on how new enterprisesshould operate to serve customers and meet business goals.A glance at the work system snapshot in Table 1 shows thatOD/EE for new enterprises differs from OD/EE for estab-lished enterprises that want to operate more efficiently oreffectively. The difference is that there is no need to startwith the existing organization.

3.2 Organizations that span multiple enterprises

Supply chains and other interorganizational systems can beviewed as organizations that span multiple enterprises. Win-ter et al. [12] note that “many important work practices,routines, and digital artifacts occur outside of organizationalcontainers; increasingly work is not cleanly encapsulatedwithin a single organization’s boundaries” (p. 4). It proposesan updated sociotechnical framework (neo-STS) that rec-ognizes how work and infrastructures may be distributedacross multiple organizations, thereby requiring conceptssuch as multi-encapsulation, complex relations among ele-ments, multi-inheritance, and continual negotiation” (pp.26–27). The general topic of organizations that span mul-tiple enterprises could be an important focus for OD&EE.

3.3 Mergers and acquisitions

Organizational mergers and acquisitions generate manyimportant OD/EE-related challenges. For example, howshould the merged organization operate? In the case of pureacquisitions, what is the most effective way to integrate theacquired firm into the acquiring firm? See [9] for a relatedliterature review.

3.4 Organizational design in the face of organizationalchange

The term design can be used as either a verb, as in designingsomething, or as a noun, as in the design that was produced.In viewing “organization design as “an emergent and neverending process” the Editorial seemed to reject the notion

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Table 2 OD/EE researchquestions suggested by lookingat the different elements of anOD/EE work system

that an organizational design (the noun form of design) is astatic specification meant to endure over time. On the otherhand, design processes often produce documented outcomesthat aremore tangible than the ephemeral understandings andcommitments of participants and stakeholders. The treatmentof organization design in the face of organizational changeis an important topic that OD&EE should welcome.

3.5 Emergent change and self-organization

The Editorial says “as a concept, organizational design isunderstood as the planned and emergent rules of interactionwhich identify any organization and intervene in the myr-iad of links between its social and technical elements”. Thatgeneral understanding implies that organizational designshould encompass emergent change in some way. Appropri-ately guiding the forces of emergent change, i.e., designingfor emergence, should be an important aspect of organiza-tional design. There is no question that secondary design [5]

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occurs in many ways, including adaptations, workarounds,and experimentation. It is not at all clear how those impor-tant ideas should be incorporated into the general discourseof OD/EE. Similarly, for ideas related to self-organization.Again, these are topics that OD&EE should welcome.

3.6 Durability of OD/EE work systems

Research on the practice of OD/EE probably will find thatsome OD/EEwork systems persist over time, whereas othersare isolated projects that are expected to go out of existenceafter producing a design and related understandings. It seemslikely that the OD/EE work systems that persist over timewill be associated with large IT groups trying to establish andmaintain enterprise architectures that will be used to rational-ize future information systemdevelopment andmodification.In many other situations, especially with small enterprisesand startups, the organization may not have the resourcesto maintain an ongoing OD/EE effort. Thus, well conductedsurveys of the practice of OD/EE could be quite valuable ingoing beyond speculation about howOD/EE tends to unfold.

3.7 Different types of models

OD/EE studies should pay special attention to describing andevaluating different types of OD/EE models. Among manyother topics, the description ofOD/EEmodels should includethe following:

• The extent to which the model uses business vocabularyvs. concepts understood most deeply by technical spe-cialists

• Whether the model is a tabular model, a mathematicalmodel, the business process model, an IT-specification,or some other type of model.

• Whether or not the model is designed to be used interac-tively by stakeholders

• Whether the model provides access to information at dif-ferent levels of detail, e.g., whether it brings capabilitiesto drill down to explore details that might not be apparentat a higher level of aggregation

• Whether the model is adaptable by users, or alternativelywhether it only can be changed by modeling experts.

Recognition of the different types of models is important formaking sure that generalizations about OD/EE are based onrealistic assumptions about the nature of real world practices.

3.8 Participants and other stakeholders

Thinking of models as boundary objects implies that they areused to support collaboration between two or more groups ofpeople. As boundary objects they have to be understood byeach person who uses them in that way. Different users may

have quite different understandings of the samemodel.Whenthose understandings diverge significantly, there is the ques-tion of whether the model actually supports a sufficient levelof understanding by all concerned, or, alternatively, whetherthe model is genuinely meaningful to one group of users andbarely understood by another group.

3.9 Boundaries of OD/EE

Afinal topic is the boundary betweenwhat belongs inOD/EEand what simply does not belong there. An example is thenature and scope of any business process specifications thatmight be viewed as part of an OD/EE effort. There is anestablished subdiscipline called BPM, business processman-agement [11], that focuses on business process models andtheir use. Much BPM research is fundamentally about devel-oping and managing business process models, rather thanbusiness processes per se [10].

Since the design and engineering of organizations at leasttouches on the business processes, there is a question aboutwhether BPM is part ofOD/EE, ormore specifically, whetherparticular aspects of BPM overlap with OD/EE. As withthe inherently artificial distinction between organizationaldesign and organizational engineering, there is little valuein proposing precise distinctions between what belongs inBPM, what belongs in OD/EE, and where the overlaps lie.The valuable point for OD/EE is that overlap with certainparts of BPM should be welcomed as a legitimate part of thescope of OD/EE. The same should apply for overlaps withother subdisciplines.

4 Conclusion

This paper responded to an Editorial in this issue of OD&EEthat makes many valuable points while announcing a newdirection for the journal.

This paper contributes by showing how to think aboutOD/EE as a work system. While thinking about OD/EE inthat waymight seem obvious, andwhile almost every page ofthe Editorial includes the term system at least once, the Edi-torial actually did not talk about OD/EE as a set of processesor activities performed by a sociotechnical system.

Visualizing OD/EE as a work system has many benefits.First, as illustrated by Table 1, it provides a way to summa-rize, compare, and evaluate OD/EE activities. It was notedearlier that Table 1 represented my view of a typical, genericOD/EE work system, and that readers might disagree withthat view. The format in Table 1 provides an easy way to rep-resent and compare alternative views. Similarly, separatingout the various work system elements suggests a path towardrich evaluation of OD/EE work systems and their elements.Table 2 uses the same format to identify a large number ofresearch issues that could be addressed in OD&EE articles.

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The section on special cases and valuable focal points iden-tifies other areas that seem to belong in OD&EE. I hope thatthis paper’s ideas prove beneficial as OD&EE continues todevelop.

Note This paper made no effort to repeat many of the same referencesthat were used in the Editorial at the beginning of this issue of OD&EE.It would have done so if it were a stand-alone paper and not a responseto that Editorial.

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