Ontological Glossary
This brief ontological glossary
- (i)
explains the meaning and use of terms in the context of this work, and
- (ii)
puts these terms into a mutual context by denoting their context in a diagrammatic form
Its objective is to enable an overall understanding of the addressed topics, as they stem from different fields and might have certain meaning in various technical domains. Wherever possible, the original meaning of terms has been incorporated into their explanations, in order to acknowledge their origin, while sometimes widening their scope to increase the intelligibility of the presented concepts and techniques.
For the sake of usability, we start with the textual descriptions in alphabetical order of essential terms and proceed with the ontology diagram.
Actors
are those entities in an organization who actually carry out business or work processes based on their knowledge.
Business operation
= handling all business-relevant activities.
Business processes
describe how actors work together and perform their work contributions in an organization to pursue a common goal. They are specifications of who is doing what with which information, material, or goods to achieve the objectives of a business.
Facilitators
are persons preparing and guiding the elicitation, representation, alignment, validation of work knowledge and the execution of processes. They are social caretakers with methodological accountancy.
Mental models
are representation to understanding how people make decisions based upon their perception of their current work situation and their prior knowledge.
Articulation & Alignment
= process of elicitation, representation, sharing, collective validation, enactment, and generation of knowledge.
Role carriers
are persons or digital system accomplishing or implementing a certain work task and showing corresponding behavior, such as accountant and information provider.
Situations
are snapshots of a business operation, for example, a business case, some market event.
Stakeholders
are persons, organizational units, or organizations relevant for a situation or business operation, for example, business partners, customers.
Work activities
are derived from work tasks and denote a set of specific actions, for example, send/receive messages.
Work knowledge
is required to perform the business and work processes, and it enables actors to make their decisions on how to continue work based on their perceptions of the environment. It captures information on
why
and
how
to operate a business, for example, cross-selling a product for increasing market share.
Work tasks
are derived from business operation and denote sets of work activities.
Fig. A.1Ontology of essential terms used in this work
The ontology is presented in diagrammatic form as concept map. Thereby, nodes represent terms and direct links represent semantic relations which allow reading binary relations between two nodes (terms) as natural language expressions. For the sake of intelligibility, only single relations between terms have been used.
The diagram positions the Actor and carrier of Work Knowledge in a work-specific Role—we denote the terms of the ontology with upper case letters. Work Knowledge is represented in individual Mental Models. As these mental models influence the behavior of Actors in work-specific Situations, they are target of Articulation and Alignment. Both are guided by a Facilitator, another relevant Stakeholder for digital work design.
As a Role Carrier, an Actor is part of a Situation which characterizes a Business Operation. Thereby, Actors accomplish Work Tasks that are part of Business Processes in order to achieve the objectives of the business. As constitutive part of Business Processes, Roles denote the responsibility of Work Tasks, also being a functional part of Business Processes. Work Tasks are described by Work Activities set by Actors, including communication and interaction with other actors and digital systems.