VDML for Business Architects: Part 3 of 11, Organization

Please see the post for VDML for Business Architects: Part 1 of 11, for the introduction to this series of posts.  This part focuses on collaboration as a fundamental organizational concept for more robust modeling of the structure, operations and relationships of people and organizations to achieve enterprise objectives.
1.    Collaboration as how all work gets done

Collaboration is the fundamental concept for how work of an organization gets coordinated and accomplished.  Any collaboration can receive inputs, produce outputs and contribute to values. Collaborations include all forms of persons and/or other collaborations working together for a shared purpose.  Collaborations are specialized to four sub-classes: OrgUnit (organization), BusinessNetwork, Community and CapabilityMethod (process abstraction). 

2.    Organization structure

An organization hierarchy is composed of nested OrgUnit collaborations with Position roles, including roles for unit leader/manager and sub-organizations.  OrgUnits, in general, have responsibility for resources in Stores (consumable resources) and Pools (reusable resources including personnel). 

3.    Collaborations as a core building block

A collaboration has Participant roles that do the work of the collaboration.  A role may be filled by another role such as an OrgUnit Position, or a collaboration (as a Performer) representing delegation of one collaboration to another (most often a capability method delegates to an OrgUnit that performs another capability method).  These capability methods can be implemented as sharable services that contribute to multiple value streams and lines of business.

4.    Context-based role assignments

Scenario-based contexts enable some capability methods to be engaged in different contexts including other value streams and lines of business.  The measurements and role assignments will be different in different contexts.  Performance measures may depend on different work products and facilities. Roles of the capability method may draw on personnel resources of different organizations.

5.    Roles of roles

Roles can be filled by roles.  This enables, for example, roles of an OrgUnit to fill roles of a capability method or roles of another collaboration such as a project team or a committee.  Roles may represent personnel in a Pool for assignment to roles in other collaborations.

6.    Extended organizational relationships

Traditional organization models focus on the management hierarchy with weak recognition of other relationships that are essential to the operation of the business.  VDML provides for integrated modeling of the many cross-organization collaborations and multiple roles of employees to identify the multiple contributions and relationships of employees in additional collaborations.

7.    Organizational change impact analysis

Cross-organizational role assignments highlight less obvious organizational contributions and dependencies.  These are important relationships to understand when changing organizational assignments.

8.    Shared personnel/resources

VDML can represent personnel and resources shared across organizations for resource sharing and workload balancing.