Proceedings of FSWKS_06 conference abstracts

Work Organization Ontology - Development and Representation

Title:

"Work Organization Ontology - Development and Representation"


Author:

Cristóvão Sousa
(INESC Porto, Porto, Portugal)



Flexibility, efficiency, innovation in enterprises are key factors for productivity improvement achieved trough new effective business process management and new forms of work organization. Afterwards the “Green paper” on “Partnership for a new organization of work”, a lot of studies emerged; discussing the process of change in the way and work is performed, critical aspects, methods and methodologies. However there is no standardized model.
Beyond the human resources, market and technology, new drives such as trust, commitment and multi-functional teams emerge in this context where business processes are not only inside the organizations but it crosses organizations. An example is the study from Sinha and Van de Ven (2005) regarding de work design within and between organizations shows the main scenarios about work design organizations and its dimensions.
Technical and organizational innovation processes e.g., business process reengineering and work redesign are normally loosely coupled leading to a sub-optimal socio-technical system. Closer interaction between these design processes is needed which calls for multi-disciplinary development teams sharing knowledge and competencies. A new category of methodological tools supported by modern knowledge management technologies is needed in order to make feasible such complex development processes.
Such a tool relies on situational agreements regarding the terminology and semantics of the involved scientific and practice fields. These agreements need to be formalized in "ontologies" that serve both the purposes of human and machine understanding the domain of discourse. An ontology can present in a simple way the action fields in the work organization domain and group the main formal concepts and it’s correlation without the constraints of pre-defined reorganization models.
The presentation will give an overview of a work organization ontology and the way it was developed in terms of concepts and knowledge representation and knowledge sources analyzed for that goal.


Key-words:

Productivity, business process, new forms of work organization, work design, knowledge management