Conceptualizing Enterprise Dynamic Systems Control For Run-Time Business Transactions

Abstract

Business transaction models prescribe the design freedom restrictions of a process-based organization and are useful to share a common understanding between the stakeholders that have a diverse interpretation of it. However, business transaction models do not guarantee that the business actors perform them accordingly. Business actors, individually and/or collectively, operate the organization and also administrate and control (steer and transform) it, by means of observing the state of the world and then acting with purpose to change its state. Therefore, a business actor is simultaneous a controller agent and a controlled agent within an enterprise. Classical dynamic system control theories alone are not applicable in a straightforward way to an enterprise because of the prohibitive complexity needed for the comprehensive definition of the business transactions’ dynamics. This paper conceptualizes the alignment of business transactions models with operations performed at run-time by the business actors, grounded on the emerging field of Enterprise Engineering and well-known Dynamic Systems Control theory, to elicit purposeful design requirements for a full enterprise dynamic systems control solution. A preliminary Markov chain simulation aids in clarifying the design requirements intent for the observation concept. In this simulation, the business transactions are observed considering three distinct variables: state space, transition space and actor roles.