Capturing Change Descriptions as Patterns in an Organisation's Changing Socio-Technical System

Brier, John; Rapanotti, Lucia and Hall, Jon G. (2006). Capturing Change Descriptions as Patterns in an Organisation's Changing Socio-Technical System. Technical Report 2006/08; Department of Computing, The Open University.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.21954/ou.ro.0001604f

Abstract

In organisations, competitive advantage is increasingly reliant on the alignment of socio-technical systems with business processes. These are complex and volatile due to the rapid pace of marketplace change. An organisation's success increasingly relies on its adaptability. Within this changing environment our work aims at developing tools that encourage an employee driven continuous process improvement opportunity, when considering the deployment and use of computing. Our focus is the analysis and synthesis of change, captured as a codification of recurrent patterns of change in a suggested notation of Change Frame Diagram. In this paper we extend our work by reinforcing with description, the change context modelled between 'before' and 'after' change scenarios, and their comparison. We identify context specific variables that support reasoning about the context in which change takes place. We exemplify our approach on a more complex real-world example than previously, resulting in a further, potential, Change Frame Diagram.