Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
The VO will change through time by modifying its states, occurred after a change in
the environment, and it will change from one state to another by means of a transition.
The following subsections will describe in detail these three elements.
4.1
Organizational Specification
The Organizational Specification details the set of elements that specify the organiza-
tion, containing organizational units, roles, norms, and the rest of elements that build
the dimensions of a Virtual Organization. The Organizational Structure is composed
of: (i) the
Structural Dimension
, which contains roles, organizational units and their
relationships; (ii) the
Functional Dimension
, describing objectives, functionalities and
services of an organization; (iii) the
Environment Dimension
, which describes the arti-
facts and workspaces from the environment of the organization; and (iv) the
Normative
Dimension
, which defines the norms that rule the system.
Structural Dimension.
The
Structural Dimension
describes the components of the
system and their relations. It allows defining the structural components of an organiza-
tion, i.e. all the elements that are independent from the entities that are finally executed.
In a more specific way, it defines the organizational units and the structural elements,
roles and relationships between roles.
Definition 2
.
The Structural Dimension (SD) of a Virtual Organization is defined as
SD
=
R
,
OU
,
Relations
where:
-
R refers to the roles of the organization.
-
OU is the set of organizational units.
-
Relations is a set of relationships, defined as Relations
=
SocialRelations
,
StructRelations
,
DimRelations
where:
•
SocialRelations
refers to the social relationships between roles, which can be
formalized as:
⎧
⎨
in f
:
R
→
R
col
:
R
→
R
SocialRelations
=
sup
:
R
→
R
⎩
comp
:
R
→
R
where:
inf
(information) refers to the information relation, which allows com-
munication between roles;
col
(collaboration) allows a role to monitor the ac-
tivities of other roles;
sup
(supervision) defines that an agent playing a specific
role can transfer or delegate one or some of his objectives to a subordinate
role; and
comp
(compatibility) depicts that an agent playing a specific role can
also play another compatible role in the organization at the same time.
•
StructRelations
refers to the structural relationships defined by the structure
of the organization, which can be formalized as:
⎧
⎨
RoleHier
:
R
→
R
2
OU
StructRelations
=
Contains
:
OU
→
⎩
2
R
Roles
:
OU
→
