Towards a core ontology of organisational transformation

Abstract

Organisations are increasingly transforming themselves to remain profitable and obtain sustainable competitive advantages. Business processes are as important as technology in promoting organisational transformation. Organisational transformation ultimately entails combining existing business components, whether or not with the same use and design, with new ones to generate novel products and services. For example, one particular type of organisation transformation is digital transformation. This notion, which covers even the subjective aspects of organisational transformation, is currently under intensive discussion and suffers from the semantics terms fluctuation related to the notion of ‘organisational transformation’. We argue that this topic could strongly benefit from an ontological analysis and conceptual clarification of these notions. This paper contributes with an attempt in this direction by proposing a Core Ontology of Organisational Transformation (COOT). This ontology comprises concepts and relations central to creating a reference model representing the organisational transformation paradigm. COOT was applied in a real-world case study on a car rental company.

Keywords

Organisational transformation core ontology UFO

1. Introduction

Organisations are increasingly confronted with the need to respond creatively and adapt to changes in order to remain viable and develop sustainable competitive advantages. Many organisations will cease to exist unless they keep up with technology trends (Ioannou, 2014). However, more than merely incorporating information technology (IT) into business processes is needed to allow organisations to be innovative and remain competitive in the Digital Age (vom Brocke et al., 2016). These can also prompt profound business strategy changes, as it often implies combining existing business components of various kinds to generate novel products and services (Henfridsson et al., 2018).

In order to define digital transformation, Bogea Gomes et al. (2020a) proposed the Digital Transformation and Innovation Business Process Management Ontology (DT&I-BPM-Onto). This ontology was then used in a case study on a car rental company. This study examined the extent to which DT&I-BPM-Onto could support the representation of a digital process transformation (Bogea Gomes et al., 2020b). From the results, we observed that a thorough definition of some fundamental concepts related to subjective aspects of an organisational transformation was still required. These are listed in the sequel.

First, the subject of transformation, i.e., the organisation itself, should be described in detail. DT&I-BPM-Onto defines Business Organisation as a limited liability company or partnership that sells goods or services to make a profit (Bogea Gomes et al., 2020b). According to Ferrario et al. (2018), organisations and their relationships are studied by many disciplines, considering their conceptual or concrete aspects. For example, while most firms have only one location, a single firm can also consist of one or more establishments as long as they fall under the same ownership. Furthermore, the same business organisation can have a wide variety of business units, such as a business unit for retail and a business unit for corporations. All those concepts needed to be included in DT&I-BPM-Onto. Second, organisation transformation events needed to be described in DT&I-BPM-Onto. Digital or otherwise, organisational transformation is a type of organisational change (Porras and Silvers, 1991). None of these notions has been adequately explored either by DT&I-BPM-Onto or in the literature.

Transformation is an important topic on many organisations’ strategic agendas because they need to change constantly to remain viable and ensure sustainable competitive advantages (Henriette et al., 2016). While transformation is ideally undertaken preemptively, in practice, it is much more an intentionally generated response to challenging circumstances (Reeves et al., 2018). Such transformations may impact business models, operational processes and end-user experiences, as well as produce technological shifts (Henriette et al., 2016).

Numerous researchers have examined the topic of organisational transformation, mainly to discuss the impacts of management, processes, practices, integration, culture, leadership and implementation. For example, Yazdani et al. (2018) propose a change management model for implementing business process management; Labusch and Winter (2013) discuss what activities and information inputs can be provided by enterprise architecture management (EAM) to manage enterprise transformation; Safrudin et al. (2011) present a conceptual model explaining how required management services are orchestrated during such a business transformation initiative; Bahner and Stroh (2004) introduce a Transformation Management Investment Model aiming to enable organisations to respond more quickly and creatively to changing market conditions, business and customer needs; Zaoui and Souissi (2018) explain the concept of organisational transformation through the identification of the digital transformation conceptual components required for designing a knowledge model, and Sen and Sinha (2016) describe how their ontology captures the knowledge of the practice transformation process. In order to fulfil their goals, all those authors explain the concept of organisational transformation. However, according to Reeves et al. (2018), the research underpinning the design and execution of corporate transformations is surprisingly poor and lacks an evidence-based approach. Primarily, the question of what exactly is transformed and how still needs to be satisfactorily answered.

In order to address these open issues, in this work, we propose a contribution towards a Core Ontology of Organisational Transformation (COOT). In particular, we propose the first ontology module of this ontology to investigate the following research questions:

RQ1. What is an organisational transformation?

RQ2. What are the potential subjects (of change) in organisational transformations?

RQ3. What are the characteristics of a planned organisational transformation?

RQ4. What are the outcomes of an organisational transformation?

With COOT, we intend to establish a proper ground for understanding organisational transformation phenomena. In particular, we intend to address the missing point of view in DT&I-BPM-Onto. On the one hand, COOT is more general than DT&I-BPM-Onto, as it goes beyond the specific aspects of digital transformation. On the other hand, it is much more detailed, thus providing a basis for representing those specific aspects. We are acutely aware that the ontology proposed here addresses a subset of the notions involved in the organisational transformation domain. So, despite providing a deep analysis of the notions involved in answering the aforementioned RQs, the work presented here should be taken as the first of many COOT ontology modules, given that it covers a specific aspect of this complex domain.

COOT is a Core Ontology grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) (Guizzardi, 2005). Moreover, it reuses and integrates two other relevant Core Ontologies, namely: (a) COVER (Common Ontology of Value and Risk) (Sales et al., 2018); (b) the W3C organisation Ontology (W3C, 2014). Although there are alternative ontologies of organisations, e.g., (Ferrario et al., 2018), we decided to reuse (b) for its simplicity. In particular, it focuses on the minimal aspects of organisational structuring and decomposition germane to this article’s purposes. This aspect of simplicity is an essential non-functional requirement here, given that we want our ontology to be used by scholars and practitioners in organisational studies, who often lack a formal logic and formal ontology background. By being an international standard intended for a broad and multi-disciplinary audience, the W3C organisation ontology was designed with such a simplicity goal in mind.

COOT was engineered following the SABiO methodology (de Almeida Falbo, 2014). In this paper we revisit the aforementioned real-world case study of a car rental company, demonstrating how COOT can articulate and represent notions that are missing in (Bogea Gomes et al., 2020b).

The remainder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 sets out the background knowledge used in this work. Section 3 describes the methodology to build and evaluate COOT. Section 4 presents the proposed ontology. Section 5 describes its evaluation, and Section 6 discusses the results and compares them with the findings of other studies. Finally, Section 7 concludes the paper with some final remarks, the study’s main contributions and limitations, and prospects.

2. Background knowledge

This section provides the theoretical background for developing COOT. Section 2.1 introduces the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and the UFO-based modelling language OntoUML. Section 2.2 introduces UFO-B. Section 2.3 presents UFO-C. Section 2.4 elaborates on the organisation concept. Section 2.5 presents the COVER ontology, which defines the concept of value adopted in this study. Section 2.6 presents an overview of Digital Transformation and Innovation Business Process Management Ontology (DT&I-BPM-Onto), focusing on concepts directly related to transformation.

2.1. Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO) and OntoUML

UFO is an axiomatic formal theory based on contributions from Formal Ontology in Philosophy, Philosophical Logic, Cognitive Psychology, and Linguistics. UFO has been conceived as a foundation for conceptual modelling. Over the years, it has been successfully employed to support ontological analysis and conceptual clarification in many domains (Guizzardi, 2005; Guizzardi et al., 2008; Botti Benevides et al., 2019; de Oliveira Bringuente et al., 2011).

OntoUML is an extension of UML Class Diagrams whose meta-model has been designed to comply with the ontological distinctions and axiomatisation of UFO (Guizzardi, 2005; Fonseca et al., 2019; Guizzardi et al., 2021; Almeida et al., 2019a).

A recent study showed that UFO is the second-most used foundational ontology in conceptual modelling, with the fastest adoption rate (Verdonck and Gailly, 2016). This study also shows that OntoUML is among the most used languages in ontology-driven conceptual modelling.

UFO is structured into three modules; UFO-A (an Ontology of Endurants) (Guizzardi, 2005), UFO-B (an Ontology of Events) (Botti Benevides et al., 2019), and UFO-C (Guizzardi et al., 2008; de Oliveira Bringuente et al., 2011) (an Ontology of Social and Intentional Entities). UFO-A and UFO-B are directly reflected in the modelling primitives of OntoUML, as well as in the constraints that govern the relations between these primitives. UFO-C has been built on top of UFO-A and UFO-B to systematise social concepts such as plan, action, goal, agent, intentionality, commitment, and appointment, among many others. UFO-C, however, is represented as an OntoUML library with general categories that are later specialised by the corresponding domain-specific notions.

A brief explanation of a selected subset of the ontological distinctions set out by UFO is offered in the remainder of this section. We also show how these distinctions are represented by the modelling primitives of OntoUML (as a UML profile). Following that, we briefly present the categories comprising UFO-A; the two subsequent sections focus on the categories of UFO-B and UFO-C, respectively. For an in-depth discussion, philosophical rationale, formal characterisation and empirical support for these categories, one should refer to (Guizzardi, 2005), (Guizzardi et al., 2008), (Botti Benevides et al., 2019), (Guizzardi et al., 2022), (Verdonck et al., 2019). In this text, we highlight in bold UFO terms the first time they appear and show in «brackets» the corresponding OntoUML stereotypes. One should notice that OntoUML only represents types of entities and (Onto)UML stereotypes predicated over these types, not the entities instantiating these types. As such, when we mention in the sequel that we use the stereotype, e.g., «relator» or «collective» for relators and collectives, what we mean is that these stereotypes predicate over types whose instances are relators and collectives, respectively. Mutatis mutandis, when we mention that we use the relation of «mediation» between relators and their bearers, what we mean is that stereotyped relation is represented between a relator type and another type(s) such that the instances of these types are bound by mediation relations accordingly.

UFO makes a fundamental distinction between Endurants and Events. Endurants are entities that exist in time and can change qualitatively while maintaining their identity. Events, in contrast, are entities that unfold in time and accumulate temporal parts (e.g., a football game, a conversation, a speech). Endurants are further refined into Substantial and Aspects.

Substantials are existentially independent entities. They can be either Functional Complexes (e.g., Mick Jagger, my Car, the Moon) or Collectives («collective») (e.g., a deck of cards, a crowd). Collectives have uniform structures and contain other endurants as members («memberOf» relation).

Unlike substantials, aspects are parasitic entities and can exist only by inhering in other entities (their bearers), i.e., they are existentially dependent entities. Aspects can be Intrinsic Aspects (which depend on one single bearer) or Relational Aspects (which depend on a multitude of bearers, thus connecting them). Intrinsic aspects can be Qualities (e.g., the colour of an apple, the weight of the rock, the inflation of a country) or a Mode (e.g., a belief, an intention, a headache, but also dispositions such as electrical conductivity and magnetic attraction). Enrolment is an example of a relational aspect (also called a Relator in UFO). Qualities and modes are connected to their bearers via an existential dependence relationship of inherence1

¹
Inherence is a type of non-reflexive, asymmetric, anti-transitive and functional existential dependence relation (Guizzardi et al., 2022).

(represented in OntoUML as a relation of «characterisation» via the corresponding types); Relators are existentially dependent entities (e.g., the marriage between John and Mary can only exist if John and Mary exist) that bind together entities (their relata) via mediation («mediation») relations. Mediation is a type of non-functional existential dependence.

Let us first take a domain in reality that is populated by endurants. Entities in this domain will instantiate a number of Kinds, i.e., the genuine fundamental types of endurants exist in this domain. The term ‘kind’ is meant in a strong technical sense – it is a type that captures essential properties of the things it classifies. In other words, the endurants instantiating a kind could not possibly exist without being of that specific kind. Kinds tessellate the possible space of endurants in that domain, i.e., all endurants necessarily belong to exactly one kind. OntoUML uses the stereotype «kind» simpliciter to represent types of substantial whose instances are functional complexes and the stereotype «collective» for those whose instances are collectives. Mode, quality and relator kinds are represented by the homonyms stereotypes (see Figs 2–5). There can, however, be other static subdivisions (or subtypes) of a kind. These are naturally termed Subkinds («subkind»).

Endurant kinds and subkinds represent essential properties of endurants, also termed rigid or static types (Guizzardi, 2005). There are also types that represent contingent or accidental properties of endurants; these are termed anti-rigid types (Guizzardi, 2005). These include Phases («phase»). Phases dynamically classify their instances, for example, in the way that ‘being a puppy’ captures a cluster of contingent intrinsic properties of a dog, or in the way that ‘being a living person’ captures a cluster of contingent intrinsic properties of a person. Living Person and Deceased Person form a partition (termed phase partition), where every person instantiate exactly one of the two phases. Every instance of Living Person is only contingently an instance of Living Person (in the modal sense). For every P such that P is a Living Person, there is a counterfactual situation in which P is not a Living Person, which implies that P is a Deceased Person.

Another example of an anti-rigid type is a Role («role»). Roles are anti-rigid and relationally dependent, for example, in the way that ‘being a husband’ captures a cluster of contingent relational properties of a man participating in a marriage. In other words, the contingent properties represented by phases and roles differ as follows: phases represent properties that are intrinsic to entities (e.g., ‘being a puppy’ is being a dog that is in a particular developmental phase; ‘being a living person’ is being a person who has the intrinsic property of being alive; ‘being an available car’ is being a car that is functional and, hence, can be rented). Roles, on the other hand, represent properties that entities have in a relational context, i.e., contingent relational properties. For example, ‘being a husband’ is to bear a number of commitments and claims towards a spouse within the scope of a marital relationship; ‘being a student’ is to bear a number of properties within the scope of an enrolment relationship with an educational institution.

Kinds, subkinds, phases, and roles are categories of Sortals. In the philosophical literature, a sortal is a type that provides a uniform principle of identity, persistence, and individuation for its instances (Guizzardi, 2005). To put it simply, a sortal is either a kind (e.g., ‘Person’) or a specialisation of a kind (e.g., ‘Student’, ‘Teenager’, ‘Woman’), i.e., it is either a type representing the essence of what things are or a sub-classification applied to the entities that “have that same type of essence”.

Endurants are connected by relators while playing certain “roles”. For instance, people play the role of the spouse in a marital relationship; a person plays the role of president in a presidential mandate. ‘Spouse’ and ‘President’ (but also typically student, teacher, pet) are examples of what was technically termed a role in UFO. It is a relational contingent sortal since this type of role can be played only by entities of a single given kind. There are, however, relational and contingent role-like types that entities of multiple kinds can play. An example is the role of the ‘Customer’, which both people and organisations can play. We call these role-like types that classify entities of multiple kinds Role Mixins («roleMixin»).

Role Mixins are examples of non-sortals (also called dispersive types), i.e., types that classify endurants of multiple kinds. Role Mixins are contingent, relationally dependent non-sortals. There are, however, non-sortals that are rigid and relationally independent. These are termed Categories («category»), which represent essential properties that are shared by endurants of multiple kinds. For example, in a human body («kind»), the heart («kind») is a type of muscle («category»). Muscle is a category as we have muscles in other parts of our bodies.

Events are represented in OntoUML by having their types stereotyped as «event» (Almeida et al., 2019a). The language also includes several relations between events (e.g., parthood), between substantial and events (e.g., participation), and between modes (dispositions) and events (e.g., «manifestation»). Roles (and role mixins) whose relational dependence conditions are defined in terms of participation in events are termed Historical Roles (and Historical Role Mixins) («historicalRole» and «historicalRoleMixin»).

Finally, UFO also considers the existence of Types whose instances are other types (i.e., higher-order types), to form multi-level structures. These classes are represented in OntoUML by classes stereotyped as «Type» (Carvalho et al., 2016; Guizzardi et al., 2015; Carvalho et al., 2017). Following Guizzardi et al. (2015), we take types here to be special sorts of endurants.

2.2. An Ontology of Events (UFO-B)

UFO-B (Guizzardi et al., 2008; Botti Benevides et al., 2019) explicitly differentiates between events and endurants regarding their relationships with time. Endurants are fully present at whatever instant of time they are present, i.e., they are in time in the sense that, if a substantial S has the property $P_{1}$ in a circumstance $c_{1}$ , and the property $P_{2}$ (possibly incompatible with $P_{1}$ ) in a circumstance $c_{2}$ , it remains the same substantial S in both situations. For example, John weighs 80 kg in $c_{1}$ and 70 kg in $c_{2}$ , but he is the same John. Events (sometimes also called perdurants or occurrences) are individuals composed of temporal parts. They unfold in time, accumulating temporal parts. Examples of events are a conversation, a football match, and a symphony performance. Only some of its temporal parts will be present when an event is present. Consequently, events cannot change in the genuine sense since none of their temporal parts retains their identity over time.

For UFO-B (Botti Benevides et al., 2019): (i) events are possible transformations from one Situation to another, i.e., they can change the state of affairs in reality from one (pre-)state to another (pos-)state; (ii) events are ontologically dependent entities as to exist, they existentially depend on their participants; (iii) events can be mereologically complex (following an extensional mereology); (iv) events are manifestations of dispositions; (iv) events relate to each other via temporal relations (Allen Relations) as well as via causal relations. Causation is derived from a mechanism of disposition activation by situations plus having events bringing about situations. In other words, if an event e brings about a situation s, which activates disposition d, which, in turn, is manifested by event e’, then we have that e has caused e’. Moreover, if e causes e’, which causes e”, then e indirectly causes e”. Indirect causation is, thus, a strict partial order relation.

Some authors, most notably (Galton, 2006), make a strong distinction between processes and events. For him: (a) processes are open-ended, whereas events are not, i.e., while events have a beginning and an end, processes go on from moment to moment and, in principle, can continue indefinitely (although extraneous factors can prevent them from doing so). In other words, an event is a piece of history, while a process can be experienced in the present; (b) processes are homeomerous, i.e., if a process goes on over some time interval, then it goes on over each subinterval of that interval; (c) processes (but not events) can be the direct objects of experience. In this respect, processes are almost more like endurants than perdurants: they are present from moment to moment, can be experienced directly, and undergo changes.

In UFO-B, in contrast, all events (atomic or complex, homeomerous or otherwise) are modally fragile entities (i.e., they cannot change) and only exist as past entities (Guizzardi et al., 2016). The term process is sometimes used to refer to complex events, but they are nonetheless entities of the same nature (Guizzardi et al., 2022). The notion of ongoing complex events is detailed in (Guizzardi et al., 2016), and, in a nutshell, ongoing events are modelled as having successive numerically distinct events of the same kind that are proper parts of their successors. A defined description as a constant (e.g., this walk to the station, this fall of the rock) gives the illusion of numerical identity of these different succeeding events and is individuated by a constant focus, namely a background endurant which is either the changing quality at hand (Guarino et al., 2022) (e.g., the vertical position of the falling rock) or the disposition of which the event is a manifestation (Guizzardi et al., 2016) (e.g., an intention to walk to the station).

2.3. An Ontology of Social Entities (UFO-C)

One of the main distinctions made in UFO-C is between Agents and (non-agentive) Objects. Agents (but not objects) are substantials that have intentionality. Intentionality in UFO should be understood in a broader sense than the notion of “intending something”. It refers to the capacity of some properties of certain individuals to refer to possible situations of reality. Thus, “intending something” is a specific type of Intentional Aspect termed Intention. Intentional Aspects can be Social Aspects or Mental Aspects. Social Commitments (i.e., commitments towards other agents) are examples of social aspects. Social Relators are relators composed of social aspects (e.g., commitments and claims).

Intentional Aspects include, besides Intentions, Beliefs (that can be justified by situations in reality) and Desires (expresses a will of an agent towards a state of affairs in reality). Intentions are desired state of affairs for which the agent commits at pursuing (internal commitment, i.e., commitments the agent creates towards itself, self-commitments) towards a Goal (the propositional content of that Intention), i.e., towards bringing about a certain state of affairs in the world. One particular type of Intention is a Closed Intention, which is a commitment to pursue a goal in a specific way, i.e., constrained by a particular type of action Type termed a Plan. Agents can be physical (e.g., a single natural person) or social (e.g., an organisation). There are various types of organisations (for instance, legal and non-legal). This work focuses on legal types of organisations recognised by law as juridical persons, such as corporations, government agencies, non-profit organisations, or international and inter-governmental organisations (such as the United Nations).

Actions are Intentional events, i.e., events that are performed by agents to satisfy their goals. Examples of actions are writing this paper and a business process. Like events, actions can be atomic or complex. A complex action is composed of two or more participations of endurants. These participations, in turn, can be intentional (and therefore themselves actions) or unintentional events. The object participating in an action is called a Resource. A complex action composed of contributions from the actions of different agents is called an Interaction. A dialogue between two agents is an example of an interaction.

Normative Descriptions are types of social objects that, being recognised by social agents, can bring other types of social objects into existence. Normative description can define one or more rules/norms recognized by at least one social agent. Examples of normative descriptions include the Italian Constitution, the University of Twente bylaws, but also a set of directives on performing some actions within an organisation (a description of a plan).

Figure 1 depicts a fragment of UFO-C containing a summary of the categories discussed in this section. As previously discussed, this model is represented as a module in OntoUML.2

²
The OntoUML models in this paper use a colour convention employed by that community: light red is used for types whose instances are substantials, yellow for those whose instances are events, green for those whose instances are relators, blue for those whose instances are qualities, orange for those whose instances are situations, purple for those whose instances are higher-order types, and grey for those types whose instances can belong to one or more of these ontological categories. A strong variant of each of these colours is used to represent kinds within these categories (relator kinds, quality kinds, etc.), i.e., those types providing the principle of identity for their instances (Guizzardi, 2005).

Fig. 1.

A UFO-C fragment.

2.4. Organisation

The organisation is the main subject of organisational transformation. Thus, characterising this notion is a central point of our work. We analysed the various concepts of organisation in the literature, according to (a) Guizzardi (2005), (b) Binder and Clegg (2007), (c) Guizzardi et al. (2008), (d) Bottazzi and Ferrario (2009), (e) Almeida and Cardoso (2011), (f) de Oliveira Bringuente et al. (2011), (g) Frank (2011a), Scheer (2012), (h) W3C (2014). Table 1 compares the definitions and highlighted points in common among them.

Table 1
Organisation conceptualisation in the literature

An organisation…. (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (f) (g) (h)

is a complex entity linked to a group of people; O

can constitute and regulate complex activities that otherwise could not be accomplished; O

is not a group; O O

has some common purpose or reason for existence beyond the set of people belonging to it; O

can act as an agent, regardless of its legal form, including partnerships or associations with regularly engaged economic activities; O O

is a type of Social Agent that involves people and other agents and facilities with an arrangement of responsibilities, authorities and relationships; O O O

can bring itself into existence, along with its parts, which are organisational units, by one particular type of Normative Description; O

is an organisational structure that comprises organisational units and their relationships; O

also includes roles, which define tasks, responsibilities, and required skills to a position; O O

can have artificial agents that perform certain activities initially O

Organisations can be brought into existence (along with their parts, i.e., organisational units) by one particular type of normative description recognised by an organisation and termed the organisation’s body of norms. The organisation’s body of norms belongs to the so-called constitutive norms (Almeida and Cardoso, 2011). An organisational structure may also include roles, which define tasks, responsibilities, and required skills for a position (Scheer, 2012; W3C, 2014; Frank, 2011b).

In artificial intelligence, there is currently interest in creating artificial agents’ societies (Bottazzi and Ferrario, 2009). This results in an increasing transformation of certain human agent positions into artificial ones in the digital transformation domain. Therefore, it is essential to define what an artificial agent is. An artificial agent is a non-human and non-legal entity to which true legal responsibility cannot be ascribed. An artificial agent may also perform certain actions in an organisation. Organisations are created by physical and social agents but can be sustained by both physical, social and artificial agents (Bottazzi and Ferrario, 2009).

The literature is not consensual about the differences between enterprise and organisation. For Bottazzi and Ferrario (2009), enterprises and organisations are different concepts. Enterprises can be considered a special kind of organisation. For example, a non-profit institute is an organisation, but it is not an enterprise. Nevertheless, for the European Commission (2003) (Binder and Clegg, 2007), an enterprise represents a collection of people organised together into a community or other social, commercial, or political structure. In this paper, we will refer to the enterprise as a type of organisation (Bottazzi and Ferrario, 2009).

For W3C (2014), a formal organisation is recognised in the world at large, with associated rights and responsibilities (as a corporation, charity, government or church), particularly in legal jurisdictions (W3C, 2014). In contrast, an informal organisation is an interconnected social structure that determines how people work together. An informal organisation (e.g., a special interest group) can be formed within a formal organisation.

An organisation can be composed of organisational units, which means that an organisation can comprise other organisations (sub-organisations), which are in some way associated and hierarchically ordered. In some cases, the sub-organisation can be regarded as standalone: a legally recognised business may be part of a larger group or holding company.

The W3C Organisation Ontology (W3C, 2014) represents explicitly the organisational role that the person fulfils (e.g., the W3C ontology models the responsibilities associated with the function). An agent’s situation fulfilling that role within an organisation is then expressed through instances of the membership relationship. The concept of Post represents a position in the organisation that may or may not be currently filled. Posts enable reporting structures and organisation charts to be represented independently of the person holding those posts. Posts can report to other posts. Therefore, a post can exist without someone holding it. In contrast, a membership represents a relationship between a particular person (agent) and the organisation and does not exist unless an agent partakes in the relationship. A post can have an associated role. An organisational structure comprises organisational units and their relationships. The elementary organisational unit, which cannot be further decomposed, is called a position.

In conclusion, as we observe in Table 1, the literature seems to agree that an organisation can act as a social agent. Thus, in this paper, we take that an organisation: is a Social Agent (UFO-C), which comprises a collection of agents organised together into a community (or other social, commercial or political structure, regardless of its legal form). These structures include partnerships or associations regularly engaged in collective activities, with some common purpose or reason for existence that goes beyond those of the set of agents involved in it. An organisation could be a single integrated organisation or a collection of inter-organisational partners.

2.5. Common Ontology of Value and Risk (COVER)

Nothing is intrinsically valuable (Guarino et al., 2016). Value only exists because people ascribe it to things; thus, value is subjective to a great extent. Customers familiar with technologies might ascribe a high value to a digital business, whilst their grandparents are unlikely to do so. Value depends on the mental aspects of the value-ascribing stakeholders (henceforth value beholders), such as desires, goals, needs, and preferences (Sales et al., 2017). Moreover, for them, value is not a synonym for benefit. Value arises from weighing benefits and sacrifices. For instance, some people consider owning a smartphone of a specific brand (which is likely more expensive) to bring more benefits than the sacrifice of paying for it. Therefore, the value depends on the beholder and his or her mental aspects. However, this does not mean that an object’s intrinsic aspects (or parts) do not influence the value people ascribe to it.

According to Guarino et al. (2016), the analysis of value, value ascription mechanisms, and their motivating and influencing factors is helpful for decision-making processes. Several approaches have been developed in the value modelling literature, such as the Resource, Event, Agent (REA) Ontology (McCarthy, 1982), e3value (Gordijn and Akkermans, 2001; Gordijn, 2004), and the Value Delivery Modelling Language (VDML) (OMG, 2018). Guarino et al. (2016) present and discuss the Value Ascription Ontology (VAO), aiming at elaborating on the nature of the value ascription relationship. Sales et al. (2017) built upon the Value Ascription Ontology (VAO) to propose a theory of value propositions grounded in UFO. This theory elaborates on the nature of (economic) value, which “things” can have value, and how the process of ascribing value works. In particular, the authors adopt the interpretation of value as use value (or value-in-use), henceforth just ‘value’, as opposed to exchange (or market) value, given the former’s role in formulating value propositions. In this sense, the value of a thing is determined by how well its affordances match the goals/needs of a given agent in a given context.

An organisational transformation aims at value creation for the business. Although its focus is value creation, at the same time, the transformation does come with costs and risks, sometimes unforeseen. Therefore, it is essential to understand the opportunities and potential challenges surrounding its value creation. Since, in an organisational transformation, the nature of the value ascription (for example, the customer relationship) is more important than the value exchange between subjects, as value ascription concept considers “what” value is and “why” something is valuable, while the concept of value exchange between subjects disregards this understanding, we look to clarify the concepts involved. To that end, in our work, we reuse the concepts related to value and risk from the Common Ontology of Value and Risk (COVER) (Sales et al., 2017,2018). Moreover, we agree with (Guarino et al., 2016) on the importance of understanding “what” value is and “why” something is valuable.

Organisations need well-designed business strategies to gain a sustainable competitive advantage. One crucial aspect informing the design of business strategies are value propositions, which are types of value ascriptions. Value ascription is a judgement relationship between an agent (the value beholder) and a value bearer, which the beholder judges as having value for someone (the value beneficiary). A value ascription is an aggregation of “smaller” judgments, i.e., the value ascription components. Each component focuses on the beneficiary’s experience from the perspective of one of its mental aspects (including beliefs).

Value propositions are the answer to why customers engage in a business relationship with one organisation and not another – customers choose (Product and Service) offerings which they perceive to offer a superior value proposition. It may be beneficial for an organisation to redesign itself and its offerings to maximise the value created for its customers. Offerings describe how a product, service or feature create value for a target market segment. A business is segmented into market segments to better design offers to its customers and bring value to the business (Sales et al., 2017).

For Sales et al. (2018), value and risk are intrinsically connected. COVER shows this duality between value and risk, considering them both to be the same type of phenomena but with opposite polarity. Value is a composition of benefits (which emerge from goal satisfaction) and sacrifices (which emerge from goal dissatisfaction). Risk is one type of sacrifice, as a value reducing factor. This suggests the process of ascribing value is strongly related to the process of assessing risk.

Given this strong connection between these two concepts, COVER generalises the notions of value ascription and risk assessment into a type of relator that involves: (i) an agent who is responsible for the judgment, deemed the value and risk assessor, respectively; and (ii) the target of the judgment, that could be either an object or an event. According to COVER, the value/risk ascribed to an object is always derived from the value/risk ascribed to events (or experiences) “enabled” by their dispositions, regardless of whether these events are Intentional or not, and whether they affect one’s goals positively or negatively.

Representing value and risk as qualities means that they can also be measured according to a given scale, such as a simple discrete scale (e.g., ⟨Low, Medium, High⟩) or a continuous scale (e.g., from 0 to 100) (Sales et al., 2018).

2.6. Digital Transformation and Innovation Business Process Management Ontology (DT&I-BPM-Onto)

Digital transformation is defined as the combined effects of several digital innovations bringing about novel actors, structures, practices, values and beliefs that change, threaten, replace or complement existing organisations, ecosystems and industries (Loebbecke and Picot, 2015; Mangematin et al., 2014). Most of the new business forms related to digital transformation also include incorporating new business processes. The digital transformation through robotic process automation at Deutsche Telekom (Schmitz et al., 2019), and the well-known Uber case, are just two of the many examples where processes and technologies are side by side in promoting transformation.

In order to characterise processes and technologies side by side promoting transformation, Bogea Gomes et al. (2020a) proposed a Digital Transformation and Innovation Business Process Management Ontology, DT&I-BPM-Onto. DT&I-BPM-Onto provides a conceptual basis for business organisations to learn about Business Process Management (BPM) and digital transformation concepts and relationships, contributing to leveraging BPM in the digital era, exploring its relationship, and investigating to what extent BPM affects and is affected by digital transformation. In the following paragraphs, the terms written in versalete correspond to DT&I-BPM-Onto entities. Figure 2 presents a DT&I-BPM-Onto fragment with the main entities from BPM and Digital Transformation and Innovation.

Fig. 2.

DT&I-BPM-Onto fragment (from Bogea Gomes et al., 2020a).

DT&I-BPM-Onto specialises the types of digital transformation and innovation (DT&I) into (business model, product, business process). One or more DT&I agents perform a digital transformation and innovation (DT&I). Individual, organisation, society and software agents are types of DT&I agent. Customer, adopter, user, investor and supplier are roles played by DT&I agent. DT&I-BPM-Onto is motivated by DT&I drivers that lead an organisation to carry out a digital transformation and innovation.

A business has one or more business goals, an organisation’s short-term or long-term target that one or more DT&I outcomes achieve. A DT&I outcome is a result of one or more DT&I. DT&I-BPM-Onto explores the digital transformation and innovation (DT&I) as an explicit part of a business goal that through business goal strategy and business goal strategy offering turns ideas into value, resulting in one or more DT&I outcomes. The term DT&I object embodies what the digital transformation and innovation will transform. In innovation, with a high degree of newness, the DT&I object is a revolutionary DT&I object, which may be a new business model, product, business process (not existing in the organisation or even in the world), or still, it may exist but requires some significant change on the part of adopters. This is one of the points we had to review when grounding the ontology in UFO. We realised that what we named object needed to be re-evaluated and re-modelled. In COOT, this is related to the notion of transformable entity.

The transformed business process operationalises the transformed Business that can be embedded in one or more business environments, which in turn influences one or more business organisations. The DT&I-BPM-Onto model is organised into three groups of concepts that are independent from but complementary to each other: BPM, Digital Transformation and Innovation and Digital Technology. DT&I-BPM-Onto was developed with the aim of being a digital transformation ontology. However, while analysing the concepts related to organisational transformation, it became clear that it would be necessary to review some of the ontological choices of DT&I-BPM-Onto. In this sense, as described in Section 4, some of the DT&I-BPM-Onto classes have already been revised in COOT.

A new version of DT&I-BPM-Onto (henceforth simply called DTO) grounded in UFO will be developed as part of future work reusing the analysis and representation put forth in this paper.

3. Methodology

3.1. A Systematic Approach for Building Ontologies (SABiO)

To develop the ontology presented in this paper (COOT), we followed the Systematic Approach for Building Ontologies (SABiO) (de Almeida Falbo, 2014), which supports the development of domain and core ontologies, as well as reference and operational ontologies. Ontologies encode knowledge and make them reusable at various levels. They are used by people, databases, and applications that need to share information. Ontologies “include a range of models of varying degrees of semantic richness and complexity” (Obrst et al., 2002). This paper takes a human-oriented approach, resulting in a conceptual model intended for communicating knowledge between humans.

SABiO prescribes an ontology development process comprising five phases: (1) Identification of Purpose and Elicitation of Requirements; (2) Ontology Capture and Formalisation; (3) Design; (4) Implementation; and (5) Testing. However, since COOT is a reference ontology, we are using SABiO’s reference ontology development process that involves only three phases: (1) Identifying Purpose and Eliciting Requirements, (2) Capturing and Formalising Ontology and (3) Testing the Ontology. The Design and Implementation phases are specific to the operational ontology development process. Moreover, SABiO considers five main supporting processes spanning the development process: Knowledge Acquisition, Reuse, Documentation, Configuration Management and Evaluation.

SABiO’s Identifying Purpose and Eliciting Requirements phase comprises four activities that occur iteratively in the following order: Identifying Purpose and Intended Uses, Eliciting Requirements, Identifying Competency Questions and Modularising the Ontology. Ontology requirements can be divided into functional and non-functional requirements. Functional requirements refer to the knowledge (i.e., content) to be represented by the ontology. They can be stated as competency questions, i.e., questions that the ontology should be able to answer. This determines what is and what is not relevant to the ontology. The competency questions establish the ontology’s scope and provide a means to evaluate it. The non-functional requirements refer to characteristics, qualities and general aspects that are not directly related to the ontology’s content. A literature review was conducted in previous research to identify and organise the relevant concepts and relations with the aim of eliciting the requirements for the proposed model. These requirements are presented in the following Section 3.2.

In the phase of Capturing and Formalising Ontology, SABiO suggests that concepts and relations in a reference domain ontology should be identified, organised and analysed in light of a foundational ontology. For building reference domain ontologies, highly-expressive languages should be used. An example of an ontology representation language suitable for reference ontologies is the UFO-based language OntoUML. To develop COOT, we use UFO and OntoUML.

Once the reference ontologies are developed, they need to be evaluated (de Almeida Falbo, 2014; Guarino, 2004; Brank et al., 2005; Poveda-Villalón et al., 2012).

According to Brank et al. (2005), various ontology evaluation approaches have been considered in the literature for different types and purposes of ontologies. The authors present the following categories of evaluation: (b1) those based on comparing the ontology to a gold standard ontology3

³
“Gold standard” in the sense of comparing the syntax in the ontology definition with the syntax specification of the formal language in which the ontology is written (e.g. RDF, OWL, etc.) (Brank et al., 2006).

(which may itself be an ontology), (b2) those based on using the ontology in an application and evaluating the results, (b3) those involving comparisons with a data source (e.g., a collection of documents) from the domain to be covered by the ontology, (b4) those where evaluation is done by humans who try to assess how well the ontology meets a set of predefined criteria, as standards and requirements.

Suarez-Figueroa et al. (2013) also consider different approaches to help developers during the ontology evaluation process: (s1) comparison of the ontology to a “gold standard”, (s2) detection of common errors from catalogues in the ontology, (s3) use of dimensions and criteria for describing the quality and goodness of the ontology, (s4) use of the ontology in an application and evaluation of the results, (s5) comparison of the ontology with a data source from the domain to be covered, and (s6) evaluation by experts who check the ontology against the requirements. In addition, according to those authors, ontology evaluation can be supported by natural language techniques.

Walisadeera et al. (2016) argue that there is no agreed method or approach to evaluate an ontology in the current literature. The choice of a suitable approach depends on the purpose of validation or evaluation, the application in which the ontology is to be used, and on what aspect of the ontology we are trying to validate or evaluate.

Here, in line with SABiO’s Testing the Ontology phase, a COOT test case was designed, which involves two main evaluation processes: verification and validation. Verification aims to ensure that the ontology was built correctly, i.e., the artefact meets the competency specifications imposed at the outset. Validation, however, aims to ensure that the right ontology was built, i.e., the ontology fulfils its specific intended purpose. For verification, SABiO suggests checking whether the ontology meets its requirements during the Ontology Capture and Formalisation phase. This can be done by indicating which ontology elements (concepts and relations) are able to answer each competency question formulated. The methodology suggests that potential users evaluate the suitability of the ontology for their intended uses to demonstrate its ability to represent real world situations. In our case, in line with (Duarte et al., 2016), we used real data from a car rental company to instantiate our ontology.

3.2. A literature review to capture the organisational transformation concept

We conducted a literature review to identify research works on the conceptualisation and modelling of the organisational transformation phenomena. We collected, classified, and synthesised the literature findings. In particular, we are interested in studies that investigate the differences between the terms organisational transformation and organisational change; the concepts, constructs, conceptualisations and definitions of these two terms, and the conceptual models, ontologies, strategies and theories used to represent or explain them.

The objective of the literature review was to use its outcome to define the knowledge to be represented by COOT (its functional requirements according to SABiO) and respond to the competence questions that the ontology should answer. The literature review was conducted based on the guidelines provided by (Kitchenham et al., 2009; Boell and Cecez-Kecmanovic, 2015). We selected the following sources for our search: ACM Digital Library, AISeL, EBSCO (includes IEEE Xplore Digital Library, Science Direct and Emerald Insight), Scopus, Google Scholar, and Springer Link.

We acknowledge that all systematic studies are limited by the search string being used. We included in our search string all variations of the terms related to organisational transformation and organisational change. As always, some works might be left out of the analysis, albeit potentially relevant to the domain at hand. The main findings from the literature review are presented below.

Organisations’ environments have been changing rapidly for them to survive and prosper (Binder and Clegg, 2007). Organisations themselves are increasingly executing complex transformations, such as mergers and splits, chain redesign, sharing and sourcing, and the rationalisation of products, processes and systems (Op’t Land et al., 2009; Op’t Land and Dietz, 2012). Thus, organisations require a broader definition to incorporate, as a single autonomous legal entity, the collaborative relationships outside its boundaries demanded by globalisation, outsourcing and virtualisation.

3.2.1. Organisational change: Revolutionary or evolutionary?

The topic of organisations and their transformations is not new. Porras and Silvers (1991) studied organisational change as an intentionally planned response, which can be classified into two general types: organisational development and organisational transformation. Organisational change can be planned or unplanned; it can also be revolutionary (organisational transformation) or evolutionary (organisational development). Most planned organisation changes are evolutionary regarding an organisation’s day-to-day adaptations (Burke, 2017). In this article, we study organisational transformation or revolutionary change (also referred to as disruptive, strategic or radical change) as directed primarily to create a new vision for the organisation (Porras and Silvers, 1991).

Several different categorisations for organisational changes are described in the literature. Hernaus (2008) and Purchase et al. (2011) differentiate change-related practices, for example, by their level of impact, scope, speed, focus, structure and nature. These classifications are not exhaustive, and they intertwine with each other. The change approaches differ conceptually in their content (what changes) and process (how the change occurs). Specifically, Purchase et al. (2011) specify what transformation means by illustrating the contrasting levels of significance or the extent of the desired changes and the impacts of such changes from three perspectives – as a response to radical changes in the economic, market, or social environment; a fundamental alteration of context; and a step change in performance – as criteria for distinguishing transformation from other more modest forms of change.

Moreover, it is interesting to observe that every organisation is a “world” with a particular view that influences what its members see and let in from the world outside. To some degree, this view inadvertently or deliberately selects what is shared, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly (Sheldon, 1980). It can justify why the same transformation is successful in one organisation and not in another with similar characteristics (such as belonging to the same market segment and having similar products or services). Another approach to distinguishing transformation is the modification of context.

For Rouse (2005), enterprise is used as a synonym for ‘organisation’. Thus, enterprise transformation is at least partly driven by the external context, i.e., the economy and markets. The economy affects the markets, which, in turn, affects enterprises. The enterprise system is constituted by its input, output, state, and work processes. The concept of “state” is central to the theory of enterprise transformation. Other important constituents of an enterprise state include market advantage, brand image and employee and customer satisfaction. This author proposes that enterprise transformation is concerned with changes that substantially alter an organisation’s relationships with one or more key constituencies, e.g., customers, employees, suppliers and investors. Transformation can involve new value propositions regarding products and services, how they are delivered and supported, and how the organisation provides these offerings.

3.2.2. The motivation for organisational transformation

Although organisational transformation had become a central theme for researchers from various fields, given the large volume of publications and their various scopes and objectives, to the best of our knowledge, the most recent publications that state the problem of the lack of conceptualization are (Purchase et al., 2011; Rouse, 2005). According to Rouse and Baba (2006), the motivation for organisational transformation can be stated in terms of value deficiencies, work processes, decision making and social networks. Thus, they elaborate on two broad and complementary perspectives on transformation, namely the technical problem to be solved and the behavioural, social context and mechanisms of transformation, to contrast them and raise important issues concerning what to measure, how to collect data, and what tools are needed to model and manipulate these findings.

Živković et al. (2011) established that beyond the technical and social-technical perspectives, organisational transformation also needs to be supported by an appropriate process, as it involves all the organisation’s components, such as organisational culture, structure, strategy, management style, systems, personnel skills and shared values. However, the course of the change process depends on the content of the organisational changes. Moreover, the contents of organisational changes depend on the organisation itself and the chosen business model. Besides, for Živković et al. (2011) and Burke (2017), in a constantly changing world, the organisation is an open system that affects and is affected by its environment. For example, Živković et al. (2011) related organisational changes like mergers, takeovers and changes in ownership structure to the organisation’s age and size, its leader, business strategy and technology. However, it is crucial to remember that organisations are increasingly interconnected with other organisations located in different parts of the world, which also influence their new ways of creating value, including for their customers and partners (Keen and Qureshi, 2006). Furthermore, the characteristics of these organisational changes may also change (Živković et al., 2011).

According to Ismail et al. (2017), the work on the transformation of organisations can start at an external, internal or holistic point or a combination of them. External means, for example, when the focus is on enhancing the customer experience, eventually altering the organisation’s entire life cycle. Internal, on the other hand, means the transformation affects business operations, decision-making and organisational structures. Moreover, all business segments and functions are affected holistically, often leading to entirely new business models.

Some internal and external factors can motivate an organisation’s competitive transformation strategy towards pursuing sustainable competitive advantages (Ismail et al., 2017) and designing new value propositions. For Porter et al. (1996), competitive strategy is about being different in the following sense: deliberately choosing a different set of activities to deliver a unique mix of values different from those of rivals. By choosing the way to compete, a company makes organisational priorities clear.

3.2.3. Business model and organisational transformation

A business model can transform an organisation through a fundamental statement of direction and identity. However, a business model is not a strategy (Keen and Qureshi, 2006). The business model design is a schema of the organisation’s critical resources, transactions, and value proposition. A business model describes how an organisation creates, delivers, and captures value (Bock et al., 2020).

A business model is a hypothesis regarding who the customers are, what they value, and how the organisation will profit by delivering that value. The business model is a narrative that must be stated and helps mobilise leading stakeholders, including investors, customers, suppliers and other partners.

Keen and Qureshi (2006), Bock et al. (2020), besides other authors study business model design and organisational transformation because, despite the numerous practice-based approaches to business model design, there needs to be a greater understanding of why and how business models change.

Linz et al. (2017) argue that most established organisations have fine-tuned their business models to stay aligned with environmental changes, but these authors have yet to question their types of business model. Even though organisations know their business models inside out, sporadic changes and external trends pressure stable business models. The competition in innovation has shifted from technological and process innovation to business model innovation because start-ups, niche players and small and medium-sized businesses with relatively limited investments have the means to challenge established players.

Hernaus (2008) offers examples of transformation support frameworks. These transformation models generally comprise strategy, work processes, structure, management processes, reward systems, people competencies strategy, technology, business processes, people, management system, social system, behavioural system, critical competitive factors, culture, structure, internal economy, methods and skills, measurement instruments and reward systems.

4. Core Ontology of Organisational Transformation (COOT)

The Core Ontology of Organisational Transformation (COOT) aims to provide constructs central to creating a reference model of organisational transformation with its inherent social characteristics. COOT’s purpose and intended uses are to share a common understanding of organisational transformation and to enable the knowledge to be reused by interested organisations and researchers, either for integrating or extending it with other ontologies.

The following Competency Questions (CQs) were established to determine COOT’s precise scope:

CQ1. What is the organisation to be transformed?

CQ2. How to characterise organisational transformation?

CQ3. What motivates an organisational transformation initiative?

CQ4. How does an organisational transformation initiative emerge?

CQ5. Who are the agents involved in an organisational transformation?

CQ6. What are the roles of the agents involved in an organisational transformation?

CQ7. What organisational values are associated with organisational transformation?

CQ8. What factors enable organisational transformation?

CQ9. What are the transformable entities that originate in, and result from, an organisational transformation?

CQ10. What are the steps followed in an organisational transformation?

We used the literature review reported in Section 3.2 to identify the most important domain notions and formulate this ontology’s competence questions (SABiO’s phase 2). The results are reported in the next section. The concepts discussed here are the basis for the ontological choices when creating an ontology. In the models, we indicate the concepts of UFO and COVER which have been directly reused (by using the proper prefix UFO: Concept or COVER: Concept), and which have been extended (by using subtyping relations towards reused concepts). Some other concepts are based on notions correlated with other ontologies but are not directly reused. These are indicated in Table 2.

Table 2
Concepts based on other ontologies

«stereotype» Class Reference

«subkind» Formal Organisation W3C

«collective» Group UFO-A; W3C

«subkind» Informal Organisation W3C

«kind» Organisation UFO-C; Bottazzi and Ferrario (2009); W3C

«relator» Organisation Membership W3C; Bottazzi and Ferrario (2009)

«kind» OrganisationalBody of Norms UFO-C; Bottazzi and Ferrario (2009); Almeida and Cardoso (2011)

«mixin» Organisational Part W3C

«kind» Organisational Unit W3C

«subkind» Position termed a Post in W3C; Scheer (2012)

«roleMixin» Prospect Bearer COVER

«roleMixin» Prospect Beholder COVER

«roleMixin» Prospect Beneficiary COVER

«role» Subsidiary Organisation W3C

«stereotype»	Class	Reference
«subkind»	Formal Organisation	W3C
«collective»	Group	UFO-A; W3C
«subkind»	Informal Organisation	W3C
«kind»	Organisation	UFO-C; Bottazzi and Ferrario (2009); W3C
«relator»	Organisation Membership	W3C; Bottazzi and Ferrario (2009)
«kind»	OrganisationalBody of Norms	UFO-C; Bottazzi and Ferrario (2009); Almeida and Cardoso (2011)
«mixin»	Organisational Part	W3C
«kind»	Organisational Unit	W3C
«subkind»	Position	termed a Post in W3C; Scheer (2012)
«roleMixin»	Prospect Bearer	COVER
«roleMixin»	Prospect Beholder	COVER
«roleMixin»	Prospect Beneficiary	COVER
«role»	Subsidiary Organisation	W3C

In the following sections, several concepts related to organisational transformation are analysed and represented in the ontology modules comprising COOT.

4.1. The organisational transformation modelling

The two central concepts of COOT are the organisation and its transformation. In the following text, the terms written in versalete highlight COOT classes. The ontology COOT is presented diagrammatically in a set of modules, namely The Organisation Concepts on the Organisational Transformation (Section 4.1.1 and Fig. 3), Motivation for Transformation (Section 4.1.2 and Fig. 4), The Transformation Initiative (Section 4.1.3 and Fig. 5), and The Transformation Event (Section 4.1.4 and Fig. 6). As previously mentioned, COOT is grounded in UFO and its fragments: UFO-A (Guizzardi, 2005), UFO-B (Botti Benevides et al., 2019; Almeida et al., 2019a), and UFO-C (Guizzardi et al., 2008; de Oliveira Bringuente et al., 2011). The categories of UFO-A and UFO-B are directly reused by building the models in OntoUML; the categories of UFO-C are reused by extending the model depicted in Fig. 1. Moreover, in line with SABiO, COOT reuses COVER (Common Ontology of Value and Risk) (Sales et al., 2017,2018) and defines the concept of organisation based on the W3C Organisation Ontology (W3C, 2014), as well as some elements from the DOLCE Organisation Ontology ((Bottazzi and Ferrario, 2009) and (Almeida and Cardoso, 2011)).

Fig. 3.

The organisation, its parts, members, intentions, and assets.

4.1.1. The organisation concepts on the organisational transformation

The first of these modules of COOT is depicted in Fig. 3. This module directly extends some categories from UFO-C (see Fig. 1), namely Agent and Social Agent, Intention and Closed Intention, Normative Description, Social Relator, Plan, and Role. Two new kinds of agents are established: Group (having agents of all kinds as members) and Organisation. The notion of Group can be used to conceive collectives formed for organisational collaboration. These may be established between two or more organisations, e.g., for the scope of a particular project. From this, an entity that meets the criteria for agency emerges. It has an identity and a defining purpose independent of the particular collective of collaborating Agents involved (e.g., a joint venture between Uber and Volvo to develop self-driving cars). The kinds of Social Being and Groups supply different principles of identity. It is considered that Group supplies an extensional principle of identity, i.e. two groups are the same if they have the same members, while we can change the members of a social being (like an enterprise or football team) and still have the same social being. Moreover, the same Group can form different social beings with different purposes. This form of organisation collective typically has a shorter lifetime than the organisations from which it emerged, but not necessarily so.

An organisation is a type of social agent which is specialised into two subkinds (Formal Organisation and Informal Organisation), and which (being a social agent) accepts a particular type of normative description (termed an Organisation Body of Norms). We here consider both informal and formal norms as possible types of organisational body of norms. complex organisations are organisations that are composed of (at least two disjoint) organisational parts. Being a complex organisation is a role played by an organisation, given that the type is: contingent for organisations (e.g., organisations can become mereologically complex and cease to be so) and relationally dependent, i.e., organisations become complex by establishing parthood relations with organisational parts.4

⁴
These are relations of functional parthood and, hence, material relations in the sense of Guizzardi (2009).

The type organisational part is a mixin given that some of its instances, namely organisational units are necessary organisational parts,5

⁵

In fact, an Organisational Unit is necessarily an inseparable part of a specific instance of organisation as represented here by an inseparable parthood relation (Guizzardi, 2007).

while other instances, namely subsidiary organisations, are only contingently so – in fact, an organisation plays this role when being in a subsidiary relation with a larger organisation. An example of subsidiary organisation is a formal organisation that belongs to another organisation. formal organisations are given full recognition within the organisation’s context as well as by broader scope organisations such as a state. When the organisation is an informal organisation, it is not a legal entity in its own right. An organisation can be large, complex and contain other organisational units and even subsidiary organisations. Examples of organisational units include branches, departments and other business units.

A position within an organisation exists independently of the agents filling it. A position (termed a Post in W3C, 2014) is considered here to be a minimal organisational unit, i.e., an organisational unit that can be occupied by at most one agent (Scheer, 2012). The position differentiates, for example, the current President of an organisation (i.e., the agent currently playing that role) from the Presidency (or Presidential Office) (a minimal organisational unit). A position can exist even if it is vacant. A position is filled when an agent (termed the position holder) is assigned to that position via a position assignment. A position assignment is bound to membership by that agent in that organisation. Position assignments and memberships are examples of social relators in UFO, i.e. they bundle commitments and claims that bind the parties (UFO-C). A position is constrained to a set of organisational roles (the roles played by some agent when holding that position). If an agent, by virtue of his or their membership,6

⁶

The notion of organisational membership is akin to the notion of affiliation put forth by Bottazzi and Ferrario (2009). The authors define affiliation as “the conditions under which agents are a member of organisations”. Agents are affiliated with organisations by playing certain roles and undertaking rights and obligations associated with those roles. In our proposal, the connection between organisation members and (organisational) roles is established via membership relators, which are social/legal contracts, thus, entailing properties such as duties, rights, powers, etc. (Griffo et al., 2021). Although position assignments bind particular members to organisations, positions themselves can exist even if they are vacant – a notion not countenanced in Bottazzi and Ferrari’s original proposal. Both proposals allow non-human agents to be members of organisations. Finally, the notion of membership proposed here is more general than binding members to organisational positions. Hence, agents can be members of organisations without being their functional part, i.e., without occupying these “minimal units” of the organisation. In any case, as for Bottazzi and Ferrario, all memberships are bound to organisational roles and entail social/legal contractual properties.

is bound to an organisational role, we have that agent instantiating that role (in the sense of Carvalho et al., 2016). A position assignment is just one type of membership that can be established between an agent and an Organisation. Other examples include shareholders and members of the board. Moreover, these relationships can be established between Organisations and all types of agents (such as people, groups and other organisations). For this reason, both organisation member and position holder are modelled as role mixins (contingent, relational dependent and dispersive type).

All agents are able to bear intentions. A business intention is a closed intention that inheres in a particular type of agent, namely an organisation. The propositional content of a business intention is termed a business goal. As a closed intention, a business intention is constrained by a particular type of plan, which we term a business strategy. The organisation body of norms accepted by the organisation also brings other types of organisational assets into existence, including organisational roles and business strategies (a specialisation of the UFO notion of plan). Business strategies and organisational roles are organisational assets, i.e., resources controlled or owned by the organisation. Being “owned or controlled” by an organisation is understood as that organisation having certain legal positions (e.g., bundles of rights, duties, legal powers, liabilities, etc.) (Griffo et al., 2021) over that specific entity (Azevedo et al., 2015). As we shall see in the remaining modules of COOT, organisational assets are a cross-categorical type, i.e., a type whose instances can span across multiple fundamental ontological categories (e.g., types and relators). Cross-categorical types are depicted in grey in OntoUML models.

4.1.2. Motivation for transformation

Figure 4 shows the COOT module dealing with organisational transformation’s motivational aspects. Central to this model is a generalisation of the notions of Value Ascription and Risk Assessment from COVER (Sales et al., 2018) into the notion of prospect7

⁷
We thank João Paulo Almeida for suggesting the use of this term here.

assessment. Prospect means an apparent probability of advancement, success, and an outlook for the future. A prospect assessment is a relator binding a prospect beholder (an agent, typically the organisation itself, or one of its subparts or an agent member of the organisation), a prospect bearer, Value Entity or a Value Experience (e.g., a service delivery),8

⁸

As discussed in (Sales et al., 2018), a value experience is an event in the sense of (Guarino, 2017). These non-classical kinds of events are represented here with the stereotype «variable event».

and a prospect beneficiary. prospect assessments can be value ascriptions (to given value bearers) or risk assessments (of a risk subject) (Sales et al., 2018). One particular type of value ascription is a value proposition (Sales et al., 2018) connected with a market segment, which, in turn, is a collective of value beneficiaries (here also generalised into the notion of prospect beneficiary). The notion of value entity here is a generalisation of the COVER notion of value object to include cross-categorical types such as organisational asset.

Fig. 4.

Motivation for transformation.

A prospect assessment is created by a prospect evaluation. This event also leads to the formation of organisation beliefs (sort of UFO-C beliefs), which inhere in organisations. As we shall see, these beliefs account for changes to be promoted in organisational assets, including business offerings. business offerings are specialisations of offering relationships (in the COVER sense) and bind an organisation to an eligible market segment (a subset of a COVER market segment). Sales et al. (2017) argue that value propositions and offerings are directly related, as at the business level value propositions provide an abstract idea of the value offered by the organisation through all of its offerings for a specific market segment, measuring benefits and costs with coarse granularity. While at the offering level, value propositions regarding benefits and costs are very accurate. For them, an offering is a promise with conditional content made by an agent (the offeror) directed to a group of agents that form an eligible market segment. A value proposition (a type of value ascription) describes what an organisation delivers to its customers. In other words, it is the ultimate answer to why customers choose to hire their services or buy their products.

Organisations compete for various reasons (Sales et al., 2018), e.g., to offer better products at lower prices. Often, organisations ultimately compete for customers (Watson, 2002). In competitive markets, after evaluating, assessing, and addressing potentially favourable and unfavourable prospects, organisations carefully design Value Propositions that are aligned with business strategies.

4.1.3. The transformation initiative

The COOT module addressing a transformation initiative is depicted in Fig. 5. Here we have organisation beliefs as the basis for forming particular business intentions. A business intention (i.e., a closed commitment of the organisation restricted to a plan) may or may not become (i.e., move on to a phase of) a transformation initiative.

Fig. 5.

The transformation initiative.

A transformation initiative is a business intention for which agents (transformation initiative participants) have been allocated via social relators termed transformation initiative participant allocation. A transformation initiative participant allocation is thus a bundle of commitments and claims (vis-à-vis UFO-C) binding an agent to play certain organisational roles within the scope of a transformation initiative. The beliefs underpinning the formation of a transformation initiative are termed drivers, i.e., drivers of change. Drivers are organisational responses to prospect assessments.

The organisation brings about an organisational transformation either to mitigate risks, e.g., by eliminating threats or vulnerabilities (Sales et al., 2018) or seizing opportunities envisaged in the assessment of Value Experiences (Sales et al., 2017).

An organisational transformation is a process in the sense discussed in (Guizzardi et al., 2016,2022), i.e., it is a (typically mereologically complex) event manifesting a transformation initiative (a complex closed intention constrained by a transformation plan). That intention is what individuates the temporal parts of that event.

Fig. 6.

The transformation event.

4.1.4. The transformation event

The final module of COOT, as presented in Fig. 6, focuses on organisational transformations as complex events. As such, organisational transformations («event») are composed of participations (in the sense of UFO-B (Botti Benevides et al., 2019)). These can be action contributions (in the sense of UFO-C (Guizzardi et al., 2008)) termed transformation agent performance, or resource participations (again, in the sense of UFO-C (Guizzardi et al., 2008)) termed transformation resource participation. The former is a manifestation of the commitments of a transformation initiative participant, i.e., the commitments comprising that agent’s transformation initiative participation allocation (Guizzardi et al., 2008). transformation agent performance is an event with the participation of a transformation agent, a historical role that a transformation initiative participant plays in the scope of an organisation transformation. Analogously, a transformation resource participation is an event with the participation of a transformation resource, a historical role that an organisation resource plays in an organisation transformation. An organisation resource is a generalisation of the notion of resource in (Azevedo et al., 2015) to account for resources that are organisational assets.

As with all Events, organisational transformations map the world from (pre-)situations to (post-)situations (as in UFO-B (Botti Benevides et al., 2019)). In other words, they can promote the creation of (and other changes in) entities. Of particular interest here, organisational transformations promote changes in transformable entities. A transformable entity is anything that can be the subject of change in an organisational transformation. These include the organisation itself, its organisational units, as well as any other type of organisational asset. Business models, product and service offerings, and business processes (plans) are all considered organisational assets and, hence, types of transformable entities.

More specifically, an organisational transformation presupposes a (pre-)situation as a baseline (which transformable entities might be present) and brings about a (post-)situation that is termed in this domain an outcome (in which one or more transformable entities are certainly present). transformable entities that are the input to be transformed by this process are termed original entities. Those that are the transformed output are termed resulting entities. The resulting entity and original entity are historical roles (role mixins) played by transformable entities in organisational transformations.

organisational transformation generalizes the notion of change (W3C, 2014). As in any event, an organisational transformation is a manifestation of dispositions. In particular, it is a manifestation of commitments of one or more transformation initiative participants allocated to that transformation initiative as well as of the capacities (in the UFO sense (Azevedo et al., 2015)) of the involved agents and organisation resources.

5. Evaluation of COOT

COOT was evaluated following the guidelines proposed by SABiO (de Almeida Falbo, 2014). The two steps of the evaluation are Verification and Validation. We took a similar approach to the works of (Brank et al., 2005) and (Suarez-Figueroa et al., 2013) as the basis to evaluate the coverage and precision criteria of COOT, that is by using the ontology in an application (i.e. the case of Keyn’Go) and evaluating the results. The CQs are in non-sequential order to facilitate the narrative of the case.

The Verification step is an assessment-by-human approach to ontology evaluation and was performed manually, confirming that the concepts and relations defined in COOT were able to answer the competency questions, as shown in Table 3.

Table 3
COOT verification by competency questions

Competency question Description, concepts and relations

CQ1. What is the organisation to be transformed? An organisation is a type of social agent organised as a group of agents into a community or other social, commercial, or political structure.

CQ2. What conceptualisations characterise organisational transformation? An organisational transformation is an instance of a transformation plan – a higher-order type whose instances are Action types. Transformation participation constituting an organisational transformation may include participation by Objects playing the role of Resources (Transformation Resource Participation), or intentional participation of Agents playing the role of transformation agents (Transformation Agent Performance). Organisational transformations are manifestations of dispositions, including the Capabilities of different Agents and Resources.

CQ3. What motivates an organisational transformation initiative? A prospect evaluation process can lead to the formation of organisational beliefs. The Beliefs that underpin the formation of the (internal) commitment termed a transformation initiative are termed drivers. Here, the term drivers always mean drivers of change. Drivers are organisational responses to prospect evaluations.

CQ4. How does an organisational transformation initiative emerge? Organisations compete for various reasons, e.g., to offer better products at lower prices. Ultimately, organisations compete for customers. Two organisations compete if they offer products or services that meet the same customer needs, by making a value proposition towards a customer group. In competitive markets, therefore, after evaluating, assessing and addressing potentially favourable and unfavourable prospects, organisations need well-designed business strategies, such as an organisational transformation.

CQ5. Who are the agents involved in an organisational transformation? Agents are a category that can be instantiated by instances of the human agent, artificial agent, social agent or group (collective of agents) kinds. An Agent is an entity capable of bearing Mental Aspects, such as Beliefs, Desires and Intentions (UFO-C).

CQ6. What are the roles of the agents involved in an organisational transformation? Like all events, organisational transformations are manifestations of dispositions (UFO-B), including the capabilities of different endurants, such as agents and resources. Agents play the role of transformation agent, in which case they are termed transformation agent performance. An organisational transformation is a manifestation of a transformation initiative, a closed intention bound to a particular (transformation) plan. An agent is allocated (transformation initiative participant allocation) as an initiative participant to play a certain role in the scope of a transformation initiative.

CQ7. What organisational values are associated with organisational transformation? The organisation brings about an organisational transformation either to mitigate risks or to seize opportunities envisaged in the assessment of value experiences. A Value Proposition is a particular type of Value Ascription connected to a Market Segment, which, in turn, is a collective (i.e., a group) of Value Beneficiaries.

CQ8. What factors enable Organisational Transformation? The prospect assessment is a relationship between a prospect beholder (an Agent, typically the organisation itself, one of its sub-organisations or an Agent member of the organisation), a prospect bearer (which can be an Object, e.g., an organisational asset, or an experience, e.g., a service offering, a process execution), and a prospect beneficiary. It is connected with the creation of organisational beliefs, which can enable organisational transformations.

CQ9. What are the transformable entities originating in, and resulting from, an organisational transformation? Like all events, organisational transformations map the world from (pre-)situations to (post-)situations (in the sense of UFO-B). In such transformations, there are always entities to be transformed, termed transformable entities. Transformable entities include organisations and organisational assets. When participating in an organisational transformation event, transformable entities can play the role of an original entity (present in the baseline situation) or a resulting entity (present in the outcome situation).

CQ10. What are the steps in an organisational transformation? An assessment creates a prospect evaluation and organisational beliefs. Some of the organisational beliefs will give grounds for the formation of business intentions. A business intention with commitments (closed intention) is a formal business strategy (a type of Plan). A business intention may become (i.e., move on to a phase of) a transformation initiative. A transformation initiative is a business intention for Agents (initiative participants) via social relators termed initiative participant allocation.

Competency question	Description, concepts and relations
CQ1. What is the organisation to be transformed?	An organisation is a type of social agent organised as a group of agents into a community or other social, commercial, or political structure.
CQ2. What conceptualisations characterise organisational transformation?	An organisational transformation is an instance of a transformation plan – a higher-order type whose instances are Action types. Transformation participation constituting an organisational transformation may include participation by Objects playing the role of Resources (Transformation Resource Participation), or intentional participation of Agents playing the role of transformation agents (Transformation Agent Performance). Organisational transformations are manifestations of dispositions, including the Capabilities of different Agents and Resources.
CQ3. What motivates an organisational transformation initiative?	A prospect evaluation process can lead to the formation of organisational beliefs. The Beliefs that underpin the formation of the (internal) commitment termed a transformation initiative are termed drivers. Here, the term drivers always mean drivers of change. Drivers are organisational responses to prospect evaluations.
CQ4. How does an organisational transformation initiative emerge?	Organisations compete for various reasons, e.g., to offer better products at lower prices. Ultimately, organisations compete for customers. Two organisations compete if they offer products or services that meet the same customer needs, by making a value proposition towards a customer group. In competitive markets, therefore, after evaluating, assessing and addressing potentially favourable and unfavourable prospects, organisations need well-designed business strategies, such as an organisational transformation.
CQ5. Who are the agents involved in an organisational transformation?	Agents are a category that can be instantiated by instances of the human agent, artificial agent, social agent or group (collective of agents) kinds. An Agent is an entity capable of bearing Mental Aspects, such as Beliefs, Desires and Intentions (UFO-C).
CQ6. What are the roles of the agents involved in an organisational transformation?	Like all events, organisational transformations are manifestations of dispositions (UFO-B), including the capabilities of different endurants, such as agents and resources. Agents play the role of transformation agent, in which case they are termed transformation agent performance. An organisational transformation is a manifestation of a transformation initiative, a closed intention bound to a particular (transformation) plan. An agent is allocated (transformation initiative participant allocation) as an initiative participant to play a certain role in the scope of a transformation initiative.
CQ7. What organisational values are associated with organisational transformation?	The organisation brings about an organisational transformation either to mitigate risks or to seize opportunities envisaged in the assessment of value experiences. A Value Proposition is a particular type of Value Ascription connected to a Market Segment, which, in turn, is a collective (i.e., a group) of Value Beneficiaries.
CQ8. What factors enable Organisational Transformation?	The prospect assessment is a relationship between a prospect beholder (an Agent, typically the organisation itself, one of its sub-organisations or an Agent member of the organisation), a prospect bearer (which can be an Object, e.g., an organisational asset, or an experience, e.g., a service offering, a process execution), and a prospect beneficiary. It is connected with the creation of organisational beliefs, which can enable organisational transformations.
CQ9. What are the transformable entities originating in, and resulting from, an organisational transformation?	Like all events, organisational transformations map the world from (pre-)situations to (post-)situations (in the sense of UFO-B). In such transformations, there are always entities to be transformed, termed transformable entities. Transformable entities include organisations and organisational assets. When participating in an organisational transformation event, transformable entities can play the role of an original entity (present in the baseline situation) or a resulting entity (present in the outcome situation).
CQ10. What are the steps in an organisational transformation?	An assessment creates a prospect evaluation and organisational beliefs. Some of the organisational beliefs will give grounds for the formation of business intentions. A business intention with commitments (closed intention) is a formal business strategy (a type of Plan). A business intention may become (i.e., move on to a phase of) a transformation initiative. A transformation initiative is a business intention for Agents (initiative participants) via social relators termed initiative participant allocation.

As for the Validation and Test Case Design, since a reference ontology should be able to represent real world situations, in order to validate COOT, its concepts and relationships were instantiated using data extracted from the Key’n Go^® project. The Key’n Go^® project was launched as a new digital business model at InterRent^®, a car rental company of the Europcar^® Group. Established in more than 140 countries, Europcar^® is currently one of the main players in the car rental industry. The car rental business is a relevant sector, considering the growth of mobility systems in recent years and projections for the future (Lazov, 2017).

By instantiating concepts, test cases can be designed for the competency questions to ascertain whether the ontology can answer them when instantiated in real case scenarios. In the following paragraphs, each competency question is highlighted in bold at the beginning of the corresponding paragraph, and the terms marked in versalete in the description relate to the concepts presented in COOT. Moreover, Figs 7 and 8 depict the result of instantiating COOT for the InterRent case study. For the sake of traceability with the original COOT modules, we applied in these figures the same colour convention used in the modules.

Fig. 7.

Mental aspect of the organisational transformation.

Fig. 8.

The Keyn’Go^® transformation event and initiative.

CQ1. What is the Organisation to be transformed?

The Organisation to be transformed is InterRent^®, a car rental company recognised as a formal organisation by Europcar «Collective» of organisations, having its own Constitution (organisation body of norms). InterRent^® belongs to the highly competitive Low-Cost Market Segment.

CQ7. What organisational values are associated with Organisational Transformation?

As with other car rental companies, in building a profitable rental operation (Value Ascription), InterRent^® encountered challenges such as establishing service with “satisfactory” Value for customers. Given the market challenges, the InterRent^® board decided to hear from its customers and interacted with them using a Customer Focus Group as a prospect evaluation to review the entire customer journey process. The InterRent^® AS-IS Rental Service Assessment engaged process stakeholders, collected data, identified the existing problems and chose components to analyse the prospect evaluation findings. The InterRent^® AS-IS Rental Service Value was “Unsatisfactory”.

CQ8. What factors enable organisational transformation?

InterRent^® interacted with customers through a Customer Focus Group initiative to review the entire customer process and experience, collect data and identify problems. InterRent^® then set up a group to examine the findings of the Customer Focus Group. This same prospect evaluation event (the Customer Focus Group) produced, as a result, another prospect assessment (a Value Ascription), specifically a Value Proposition, namely quality services for a fair price and a profitable rental operation, connected with a (Mid-Tier) Market Segment – which, in turn, is a collective (i.e., a group) of Value Beneficiaries (i.e., customers who value their time and are technology friendly).

CQ2. What conceptualisations characterise organisational transformation?

After that, InterRent^® perceived (organisational belief) that the front-end process required rethinking to improve the Value of InterRent AS-IS Rental Service both for customers and shareholders. The main drivers motivating this was the fact that the perceived Value of InterRent^® AS-IS Rental Service needs to be improved both for customers and stakeholders. Some of the organisational beliefs warranted the formation of business intentions, which are types of self-commitments towards a business goal (the propositional content of the intention) – in this case, offering a new rental service focused on a Mid-Tier segment with time-constrained but technology-friendly customers. A manifestation of the business intention is the organisational transformation, which, in this case, is the InterRent^® New Rental Service Creation. A business intention may become (i.e., move on to a phase of) a transformation initiative.

CQ4. How does an organisational transformation initiative emerge?

One type of intention is closed intention, which is a commitment to pursue a Goal in a specific way. A Closed Intention is constrained by a particular type of Universal Action (termed a Plan in UFO-C, and a business strategy in COOT). The business strategy was, from a customer’s perspective, to improve quality and further simplify and accelerate processes. InterRent^®’s business strategy was designed to enhance its advantage over competitors to secure higher profitability and a greater number of satisfied customers (Merino, 2019).

CQ10. What are the steps in an organisational transformation?

A prospect evaluation comprises intentions either to mitigate Risks – e.g., eliminate threats or vulnerabilities (Sales et al., 2018) identified in a Risk Assessment – or to seize opportunities envisaged in the assessment of Value Experiences (Sales et al., 2017), such as resulting from a Value Ascription that characterises a specific Value. The prospect evaluation leads to the formation of organisation beliefs which substantiate the formation of business intentions. A business intention with commitments (closed intention) is a formal business strategy (a type of plan) that may move on to the phase of a transformation initiative.

Figure 7 depicts the model of the mental aspect of the organisational transformation, comprising a set of beliefs and intentions. An organisational transformation (InterRent^® New Rental Service Creation) is a manifestation of a transformation initiative (the Key’n Go^® Project), which as a Closed Intention, is bound to a particular (transformation) Plan. As with all events, an organisational transformation maps the world from what, in UFO-B, are termed (Pre-)Situations to (Post-)Situations. In COOT, these are termed baseline and outcome, respectively.

CQ5. Who are the agents involved in an organisational transformation?

The Agents of the Key’n Go Project (transformation initiative) were a team of three full-time senior participants. Each member was responsible for interacting with the other areas affected by the project. Those areas maintained their as-is operations, participated on-demand in the project and implemented the new operation only when it was concluded (Bogea Gomes et al., 2020b).

A position within an organisation exists independently of the Agents filling it. Following (Scheer, 2012), COOT considers a position to be a minimal organisational unit, i.e., an organisational unit that can be occupied by at most one Agent. A position can exist even if it is vacant. Positions can be filled when Agents, termed position holders (in this case, Greg), are assigned to that position via a position assignment (InterRent^® Project Manager – Greg). A position assignment is bound to that Agent’s membership in that organisation.

CQ6. What are the roles of the agents involved in an organisational transformation?

The Key’n Go^® Project was a business intention binding Agents (e.g., Greg) as the transformation initiative participant via Social Relators termed transformation initiative participant allocation (Greg’s allocation to Key’n Go^® Project), where each Agent plays a certain Role (e.g., Key’n Go^® Project Manager) within the scope of a transformation initiative.

CQ3. What motivates an organisational transformation initiative?

The Beliefs that gave grounds for forming the (internal) commitment termed a transformation initiative were termed drivers. Here drivers are always drivers of change. In this case, drivers (e.g., customers, differentiation, competition) were organisational responses to a prospect evaluation (i.e., pain points from the customer’s perspective).

CQ9. What are the transformable entities originating in and resulting from an organisational transformation?

In such transformations, there are always entities to be transformed. These are termed transformable entities. These entities are endurants, i.e., persons capable of qualitative change while preserving their identity (UFO-A). Both organisations and organisational assets are types of transformable entities. transformable entities can play the Role of both the original entity (present in the baseline situation) and resulting entity (present in the outcome situation), while participating in an organisational transformation event. In this case, the baseline is the InterRent^® AS-IS situation and the outcome is the TO-BE situation (Key’n Go^®). The AS-IS and TO-BE Business Process Models were presented in (Bogea Gomes et al., 2020b).

The customer journey process was one of the main examples of a transformable entity. To achieve its business strategy, the front-end process requires rethinking the business to improve the Value perceived by both customers and shareholders. Thus, InterRent^® worked on how to innovate the process to support its business. These stages were aligned collectively in the form of an iterative cycle of capturing, synthesising and reconciling stakeholder perceptions, as proposed by (Robson, 2002) to support business process innovation. Figure 7 shows the Key’n Go^® transformation event and initiative.

The Key’n Go^® Project reviewed the entire customer journey process and defined a new path by eliminating each pain point one after another without jeopardising the promise of quality service for a fair price (Value Proposition). InterRent^® changed certain organisational assets (such as the customer journey process) in order to launch its business offering, the “Hassle free Project, from people to people – the Key’n Go^®”.

6. Discussion

COOT’s goal is to represent what an organisational transformation is, the characteristics of the planned transformation event and its outcomes to provide the proper ground for understanding a particular type of transformation – the digital transformation. We set up four research questions in our work, to achieve this goal.

Concerning COOT Research Question 1 (i.e., “What is an organisational transformation?”), in our instantiated case, InterRent^® is an organisation operated by a group of people (staff and managers) that are organised into a commercial structure. This group has a common goal to obtain profit by offering a car rental service, thus sharing the same business objectives and purposes. InterRent^® has branches in more than 30 countries. This complex organisation, constituted by other organisations, including organisational units, was represented by means of COOT classes and relationships. InterRent^® has internal roles (in COOT, these are positions in InterRent^® and transformation initiative participant allocation in the Key’n Go^® project) instantiated by its staff (organisation members in COOT) at runtime. The composition of connected roles and their players encapsulated as role composites (position assignments in COOT) executes a goal-oriented function. This explicit allocation of participants in the transformation initiative can be essential for creating a team’s sense of responsibility for the project’s success, considering its common business objectives and purposes.

Given an organisation’s dependence on continual interaction with the environment in which it resides, any organisation is an open system (Burke, 2017) that promotes and enforces a set of restrictive guidelines, rules, incentives, and sanctions (Frank, 2011a). InterRent^® depends on and continually interacts with the car rental market environment. One example is InterRent^®’s motivation towards the Key’n Go^® project strategy. The organisational belief (“perceived value needs to be improved”) drives the business intention (“offering a new rental service focused on the mid-tier segment as an eligible market segment”), and makes the organisation allocate participants (transformation initiative participant allocation), committing to a (new) business strategy (“process simplification and acceleration from a customer perspective”), culminating with the elaboration of a transformation plan. The Key’n Go^® project has a structure replicating the main InterRent^® organisational units and their relations.

In COOT, an organisational structure includes roles associated with positions. The positions are described in terms of tasks, responsibilities and required skills. Our case also confirmed the relationships among those concepts because, during the Key’n Go^® project, InterRent^® was involved simultaneously in a multi-organisational structure. During the project, InterRent^® continued operating as usual. While part of the staff was working on the Key’n Go^® project, other parts of the same organisation were operating on the current modus operandi of a low-cost segment with their partners and suppliers. In this case, a new rental service is launched, while the other services remain unchanged.

The constructs discussed here allow us to state that, as with all events, organisational transformations map the world from (Pre)Situations to (Post)Situations (UFO-B). A business intention manifestation that becomes a transformation initiative results in an organisational transformation. There are entities to be transformed in such transformations, which we call transformable entities. Transformable entities are capable of qualitative change while preserving their identity. The organisational transformation event changes the transformable entities, i.e., the entities that are impacted by the transformation and being transformed from the original entity (present in the baseline situation) to the resulting entity (present in the outcome situation).

Concerning Research Question 2 (i.e., “What are the potential subjects (of change) in organisational transformation?”), as we have seen before, organisational transformation promotes changes in transformable entities. A transformable entity is anything that can be the subject of change in an organisational transformation. The customer journey process was one of the main examples of a subject of change for InterRent^®. It includes entities such as the business model, the business process, and (the manner of) the service offering.

For instance, in the case of the Business Model baseline (AS-IS Situation), the customer added extra things (such as insurance) in the rental, i.e., the original entities included the car rental and accessories. However, in the case of the Business Model outcome (TO-BE Situation), the resulting entity, a package is predetermined. Another example: in the business process baseline (AS-IS Situation), the process considering that the car is delivered manually at the store by original entities. However, in the business process outcome (TO-BE Situation), resulting entity, the car key is delivered automatically through a machine, bypassing the lines in the store.

Concerning Research Question 3 (i.e., “What are the characteristics of a planned organisational transformation?”), a driver or motivation is a recurrent concept explored by many authors as an internal or external cause of organisational change (Živković et al., 2011). Drivers may include economic, social and environmental factors, as well as mergers and acquisitions (Joseph and George, 2007), constraint satisfaction, high technological needs and market uncertainty (Bock et al., 2020), economy and value deficiencies (Rouse and Baba, 2006), discovery-driven decision-making (Purchase et al., 2011), global market trends (Savič et al., 2016), critical competitive factors, internal economy (Bahner and Stroh, 2004), competitors, constraints, critical success factors, opportunities, threats and risks (Harris, 2018).

An Organisational Belief involves assumptions (Harris, 2018) and behavioural systems (von Rosing and von Scheel, 2016), for example, competition by innovation (Linz et al., 2017). It also involves internal and external factors that motivate organisational transformation, which was explored by (Živković et al., 2011), as well as requiring a readiness for organisational change regarding the proposed implementation processes, as described by (Yazdani et al., 2018). After undergoing an assessment, InterRent^® established the belief that the front-end process required a rethinking to improve the Value perceived by both customers and shareholders. As a result, they carried out a Transformation Initiative, namely the Key’n Go^® project. The planned organisational transformation process by InterRent^® was characterised by its drivers and the need to differentiate between customers and competition. Its drivers (kind of organisational beliefs) inhere in internal (stakeholders) and external (customers) organisational change motivations. They include economic factors (higher profitability), global market trends (digital business), and critical competitive factors (a significant number of satisfied customers). The stakeholders were motivated to commit to a business intention (offer a new rental service) with a business goal of higher profitability. A significant number of unsatisfied customers demanded a paradigm change, leading to a Transformation Initiative: the Key’n Go^® project. Modelling helped to understand the drivers, as mentioned in the literature, and the process that leads to the transformation from the motivation factors (drivers) to the transformation results (outcome).

Organisational transformation is a type of organisational change, either disruptive, strategic or radical. An Organisational transformation is an event that creates a new vision for the organisation, promoting a paradigmatic change to support the organisation to fit its environment better or create desirable future environments (Porras and Silvers, 1991). A planned organisational transformation event starts with drivers of change (a type of organisational belief) formation as an organisational response to prospect assessment. After this understanding, the organisation establishes a commitment named Business Intention. Next, the organisation moves on to a phase of structuring a transformation initiative as a manifestation of the Organisational Transformation, resulting in the transformation outcome. The purpose of this transformation event could be either to mitigate risks or to seize opportunities for the business.

Concerning Research Question 4 (i.e., “What are the outcomes of an organisational transformation?”), a transformable entity represents the object of transformation. In an initial situation, some organisational elements of a transformable entity may or may not exist. When they exist, they could be presented in a different form, be related to other organisational elements, or have another purpose.

An appointment is a type of commitment whose goal is clearly tied to a certain amount of time. For example, a medical appointment (a type of appointment and also transformable entity) is a transformable entity («category») in a hospital organisational transformation implementation. Before the transformation, the medical appointment could only be done in-person. Now, it has two possible types: online and in-person. A resource participates in a type of transformation participation, an event that composes an organisational transformation event. For the in-person medical appointment type, the computer is used as an IT-enabled technology resource to register the patient, store his/her data, or to generate medical documents). For the online medical appointment type, the computer is used as a digital technology resource, the virtual environment that enables the occurrence of the medical appointment.

In the InterRent^® case, the transformable entity is the car rental service, i.e., the customer journey process. The outcome (the new customer journey process) is composed of new organisational elements (the software application for the process of returning cars) integrated with organisational elements that already exist in the organisation, such as the cars for rental. After the transformation, the old process for returning cars could be discontinued (if not currently used by other InterRent^® services), or InterRent^® could later evaluate the incorporation of the new organisational element (i.e., the software application) into its current process by reusing it for the other services (possibly with adaptations), resulting in a more automated process for returning cars. The software application was developed for the Key’n Go^® process for returning cars as part of the organisational transformation outcome presented in detail in (Bogea Gomes et al., 2020b). This entity, now transformed, was designed on the basis of a prospect assessment, which also served as a strategy formulation and benchmarking approach (Joseph and George, 2007), by collecting interpretations about the firm’s key elements as suggested by (Bock et al., 2020). To summarise, an outcome is the business intention’s expected result from an Organisational Transformation event.

A Transformation Initiative is “how to conduct a change” (Joseph and George, 2007). Organisational transformation is also referred to as business transformation (Safrudin et al., 2011; Maguire et al., 2008; Trad and Kalpic, 2017; Lee and Ivan, 2006), a roadmap (Joseph and George, 2007), and even a paradigmatic change (Sheldon, 1980). COOT captured those concepts from the literature and precisely describes what an organisational transformation is, how a planned organisational transformation event is characterised and what the outcomes from an organisational transformation are. COOT was able to cover the situations before and after the Key’n Go^® project and its effects, to provide a clearer picture of the project by making the transformable entities explicit, along with the related desires, goals and needs of the value-ascribing stakeholders.

We searched for other ontologies that represent the concept of organisational transformation and, to the best of our knowledge, only one work was considered comparable to COOT. The work reports a preliminary integrated domain ontology – the Domain Ontology for Organisational Change (DOOC) – for articulating the scope of organisational change, with the intention to provide a foundation for developing interactive communication methods and tools to enable effective stakeholder engagement (Harris, 2018). Comparing DOOC and COOT competency questions (see details in Table 4), we conclude that while DOOC is related to change in general, which can be a transformational or developmental change, the scope of COOT is focused on transformational change. Moreover, DOOC focuses on what changes and why, whereas COOT covers concepts from the motivation for transformation to the conception of the transformation initiative, i.e., “How to transform?”. The general scenarios addressed by DOOC are related to engaging stakeholders in a collaborative definition of the scope of a change (why change?) and communicating the scope of organisation change to all affected stakeholders (what changes?).

One interesting difference between COOT and DOOC is that COOT considers all agents involved in an organisational transformation, whereas DOOC considers only the stakeholders who would benefit from the changes. The COOT competency questions CQ1, CQ2, CQ4, CQ6 and CQ10 are beyond the scope of DOOC. Regarding COOT CQ1 (What is the organisation to be transformed?) and CQ2 (What conceptualisations characterise organisational transformation?), DOOC does not address the concepts of Organisation and Organisational Change. It assumes that an organisational unit is “a defined group of responsibilities for accomplishing a specific purpose” and represents this entity as such. Conceptualising organisation is essential to COOT, because its parts, namely organisational units, can also be objects of a transformation (transformable entities).

Table 4
Competency questions comparison

COOT competency question DOOC competency question

CQ1. What is the Organisation to be transformed? Out-of-scope. Organisation was probably considered a known, established concept and was not defined in the ontology or mapped in the diagram presented.

CQ2. What conceptualisations characterise organisational transformation? Out-of-scope. Change was probably considered a known, established concept and was not defined in the ontology or mapped in the diagram presented.

CQ3. What motivate an organisational transformation initiative? 1. What are the external opportunities (Bell & Rochford, 2016) to create or grow market share or to deliver more value to external or internal stakeholders (Frow & Payne, 2011)?

2. What are the external threats or internal weaknesses that may increase costs, reduce market share (Bell & Rochford, 2016) or reduce stakeholder value (Frow & Payne, 2011)?

3. What are the desired outcomes for the organisation and for the beneficiary stakeholders (Daly, 1995)?

4. What are the goals and indicators that reflect and measure achievement of these outcomes (ACMP, 2014)?

1b. What is the benefit to these stakeholders?

CQ4. How does an organisational transformation initiative emerge? Out-of-scope. DOOC explores what changes, but not how an initiative towards change emerges.

CQ5. Who are the agents involved in an organisational transformation? 1a. Who are the stakeholders who would benefit from change?

CQ6. What are the roles of the agents involved in an organisational transformation? Out-of-scope. The focus of change is on stakeholders in general, without highlight their roles.

CQ7. What organisational values are associated with organisational transformation? 1c. What is the perceived value of this benefit to these stakeholders?

CQ8. What factors enable organisational transformation? ANDCQ9. What are the transformable entities originating in, and resulting from, an organisational transformation? 1. What is the resulting output of the change initiative in terms of offerings and/or organisation capabilities?

CQ9. What are the transformable entities originating in, and resulting from, organisational transformation? 2. What, if any, offerings are being transformed or newly established?

3. What business activities are changing or being established?

4. What resources (people, process, technology, information, policies, etc.) used by these business activities are affected?

5. What relationships and relationship channels (external and internal) are changing?

6. What structures (financial, governance and management) are changing?

7. What incentive or reward mechanisms are changing?

CQ10. What are the steps in an organisational transformation? Out-of-scope. The focus is on “what changes” (within the organisation) and “why change.”

COOT competency question	DOOC competency question
CQ1. What is the Organisation to be transformed?	Out-of-scope. Organisation was probably considered a known, established concept and was not defined in the ontology or mapped in the diagram presented.
CQ2. What conceptualisations characterise organisational transformation?	Out-of-scope. Change was probably considered a known, established concept and was not defined in the ontology or mapped in the diagram presented.
CQ3. What motivate an organisational transformation initiative?	1. What are the external opportunities (Bell & Rochford, 2016) to create or grow market share or to deliver more value to external or internal stakeholders (Frow & Payne, 2011)?
2. What are the external threats or internal weaknesses that may increase costs, reduce market share (Bell & Rochford, 2016) or reduce stakeholder value (Frow & Payne, 2011)?
3. What are the desired outcomes for the organisation and for the beneficiary stakeholders (Daly, 1995)?
4. What are the goals and indicators that reflect and measure achievement of these outcomes (ACMP, 2014)?
1b. What is the benefit to these stakeholders?
CQ4. How does an organisational transformation initiative emerge?	Out-of-scope. DOOC explores what changes, but not how an initiative towards change emerges.
CQ5. Who are the agents involved in an organisational transformation?	1a. Who are the stakeholders who would benefit from change?
CQ6. What are the roles of the agents involved in an organisational transformation?	Out-of-scope. The focus of change is on stakeholders in general, without highlight their roles.
CQ7. What organisational values are associated with organisational transformation?	1c. What is the perceived value of this benefit to these stakeholders?
CQ8. What factors enable organisational transformation? ANDCQ9. What are the transformable entities originating in, and resulting from, an organisational transformation?	1. What is the resulting output of the change initiative in terms of offerings and/or organisation capabilities?
CQ9. What are the transformable entities originating in, and resulting from, organisational transformation?	2. What, if any, offerings are being transformed or newly established?
3. What business activities are changing or being established?
4. What resources (people, process, technology, information, policies, etc.) used by these business activities are affected?
5. What relationships and relationship channels (external and internal) are changing?
6. What structures (financial, governance and management) are changing?
7. What incentive or reward mechanisms are changing?
CQ10. What are the steps in an organisational transformation?	Out-of-scope. The focus is on “what changes” (within the organisation) and “why change.”

Regarding COOT CQ4 (i.e., “How does an organisational transformation initiative emerge?”), DOOC concepts respond to the “what changes” question by “identifying any of the organisation’s operational structures and outputs where changes are needed to achieve the desired outcomes”, but it does not explain whether this change arises spontaneously or not. In COOT, in addition to operational structures and outputs, other organisational components, such as the strategy or the business model, are also subject to transformation, which is a type of change. The organisation itself is subject to change, for example, in a merger or acquisition. This characterisation is important because it is used as a basis for definitions and modelling in COOT.

Regarding COOT competency question CQ6 (i.e., “What are the roles of the agents involved in an organisational transformation?”), in DOOC, the motivation for change comes from stakeholder perceptions, without highlight the stakeholders role, and the organisation has certain goals in response to these perceptions. COOT, on the other hand, takes a broader perspective, i.e., change contemplates all agents that may be involved (for example, in the car rental company project, these involve customers, brokers and front office clerks).

Finally, concerning COOT CQ10 (i.e., “What are the steps in an organisational transformation?”), change steps are not part of the scope of DOOC.

7. Final remarks

The broader purpose of this study is to provide an explicit specification to guide the development of digital transformation initiatives. This paper aims to clarify the notion of organisational transformation and its related concepts based on an ontological analysis of the Digital Transformation and Innovation Business Process Management Ontology (DT&I-BPM-Onto), a domain ontology, and UFO. First, the organisational transformation concepts were revisited, and a detailed model was elaborated, establishing the understanding of business, organisation, agents, roles, business value proposition, organisation offering, transformable object and transformation initiative, as well as the dynamics of organisational transformation, grounded in UFO.

This paper’s main contribution is that it investigates the subject of organisational transformation and provides an unambiguous conceptual foundation for this domain based on an extensive literature review that captured the domain of interest through a collection of classes organised into a conceptual model. The formalism of UFO provides greater precision when defining domain-independent concepts and provides a solid theoretical basis to underpin the construction of specific vocabularies for each domain. With UFO, it was thus possible to take a step back and provide an in-depth conceptualisation of the root of the problem of organisational transformation, which will ultimately foster advancements in understanding change in a digital world. A new version of DT&I-BPM-Onto (now called DTO) will be grounded in UFO. Some classes of this ontology are already presented in this paper.

Future work will include incorporating COOT into DT&I-BPM-Onto and conducting an ontological analysis of all DT&I-BPM-Onto sub-domains. As this article considers Organisational Transformations, which may or may not be Digital Transformations, we also plan to use the ontology to analyse Digital Transformation cases and verify its feasibility to support Digital Transformation initiatives consistently.

In addition, the conceptual reference ontology proposed here will be further codified with the support of gUFO – a lightweight implementation of UFO in OWL 2 DL (Almeida et al., 2019b). The resulting artefact could then be used to support automated reasoning in semantic web organisation transformation initiatives.

Finally, in the spirit of works such as Nardi et al. (2013) for the domain of services, Azevedo et al. (2015) for capabilities, Amaral et al. (2020) for trust management, Sales et al. (2019) for value modelling, Sales et al. (2018) for risk modelling, and Oliveira et al. (2022) for Enterprise Risk Modeling, we intend to employ the ontology proposed here to provide an ontology-based evaluation and redesign of the Enterprise Architecture Standard Archimate regarding its support for Organisation Transformation, i.e., the so-called Archimate Migration and Implementation Layer (Josey et al., 2016).

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

This work has been partially supported by Portuguese National funds through FITEC – Programa Interface, with reference CIT “INOV – INESC Inovação – Financiamento Base”.

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An organisation….	(a)	(b)	(c)	(d)	(e)	(f)	(g)	(h)
is a complex entity linked to a group of people;				O
can constitute and regulate complex activities that otherwise could not be accomplished;				O
is not a group;	O			O
has some common purpose or reason for existence beyond the set of people belonging to it;								O
can act as an agent, regardless of its legal form, including partnerships or associations with regularly engaged economic activities;	O			O
is a type of Social Agent that involves people and other agents and facilities with an arrangement of responsibilities, authorities and relationships;	O					O		O
can bring itself into existence, along with its parts, which are organisational units, by one particular type of Normative Description;					O
is an organisational structure that comprises organisational units and their relationships;								O
also includes roles, which define tasks, responsibilities, and required skills to a position;							O	O
can have artificial agents that perform certain activities initially				O