Designing Agile Organisations Essay -- Enterprise integration modellin

Abstract We investigate the management agreement of the endeavour as an agent maintaining a system of objectives. We then probe the organisation as a caboodle of individual autonomous co-operating agents so that agenthood of the entire enterprise becomes an emergent property of the organisation. Important questions include under(a) what condition evict agenthood emerge? how to create such an organisation?, and how to insure that change preserves agenthood?.IntroductionIt is increasingly important to devise prompt and more reliable ways of designing purposeful, agile organisations (Bernus et al, 1997). We use the interpretation 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), separately implemented partly by humans and partly by machines (Bernus and Nemes, 1994). We acquire the definitio n of the purposening agent from artificial intelligence to describe the desired quality of the organisation.We indorse necessary conditions for the enterprise to behave as an agent, and also show the kinship 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 social organisation 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 feast of actio n to achieve its set of objectives. This course of action, or plan, is constrained by the agents resources as well as the agents own functional capabilities. The organisation follows, or appears to be following this plan while monitoring the effectiveness of the actions to really satisfy the objectives for which the plan was made. If the plan fails in some way, then the plan or the objectives are m... ...319-332Koestler,A.. (1989) The ghost in the machine. Arkana BooksTharumarajah, A., Wells,J., Nemes,L., (1996) Comparison of the bionic, fractal and holonic manufacturing systems concepts. Int. J. on computing machine Integrated Manuf. (3) pp.217-226Uppington,G., Bernus,P., Assessing the Necessity of first step Change Pre-feasibility and Feasibility Studies in Enterprise Integration. Int. J. of CIM, 1998 11(5) pp 430-447Valckenaers,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 thrift and technical control of work humanization in Sweden during the 1970s and 1980s. grow 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) pp141-158Williams,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