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1999
Conference Proceeding
Titel
Object-Oriented Modeling of Network Organizations
Abstract
Two trends can be observed whose evolution has recently accelerated. In the field of Business Organization, an orientation towards network structures has taken place, culminating in the idea of the virtual enterprise. The field of Computer Science, especially the research in Software Engineering, has been focused on the object paradigm fo a while. Recently, the development has been pushed further by the availability of Distributed Object Architectures such as OMG's CORBA and Microsoft's DCOM, the arrival of the common modelling language UML (Unified Modeling Language), and new concepts such as business objects. The hypothesis that the paper examines is that the new object technologies are well suited to enable and support the emergence of new organizational forms. These new forms of business organization feature a common pattern - they are based on the idea of business networks. The main purpose of the paper is to contribute to the quest for better organizations by proposing and discussing a method to model organizational networks, focusing on the concept to model organizations in an object-oriented manner with the UML.