Modeling and integrating procedures in office information systems design

摘要

This paper presents the OSIRIS methodology for the conceptual design of office information systems. The methodology is supported by the use of a semantic office model which incorporates structural and control elements; the model has a complete graphic representation. A comparison and evaluation of existing approaches to office systems modeling and design is proposed first, in order to provide guidelines and design criteria for the proposed methodology.The OSIRIS methodology stresses the difference between the design of office procedures, which is performed within smaller organization units and should be conducted top-down, and the integration of office procedures, which involves different office units, and should be conducted bottom-up.In the design phase, refinement rules are presented which allow to proceed from a high-level description to a detailed description. In the integration phase, rules and suggestions are given to understand the mutual synchronization requirements between procedures and to produce global representations of these requirements. Finally, the reduction of the integrated representation to a “canonical” form, which requires the minimum number of elements, is discussed.