An Organization Model to Support

The rapid growth of computer networks, along with the wide acceptance of the Internet and Intranet (Cole 2003; Whinston et al. 2001), has pushed distributed computing into a new era. Software developers who used to focus solely on atomic and isolated computational models are now expanding their scope to cover group-computing solutions as well. Numerous research efforts in collaborative computing and process management have resulted in workflow and other automation techniques. These attempts emphasize mainly theories regarding process modelling and concurrent activity coordination. However, applications of these technologies in a large production environment have faced major setbacks due to the disconnection between the conceptual process definition and the actual complex operations of the real operating environment. The principal problem is that organizational information is rarely, if ever, comprehensively modelled, let alone integrated, into the process management system. Indeed, without a flexible and extensible organization model to describe the global resource information, it is impossible for a rapidly changing company to apply an enterprise-wide workflow system or groupware solution to handle global assignment, authorization, authentication, notification, and role migration. In this thesis, we define the issues in organization modelling and review the existing systems that are used to address these issues. We then propose a formal organization model, namely OMM (Organization Modelling and Management), which uses a hybrid approach (a cross between ER and OO) to capture all organizational resources available to the enterprise. With the OMM approach, thousands of dynamically changing complex inter-relationships between resource objects are abstracted into a handful of business rules. Under the proposed model, an enabling service is defined to support dynamic role resolution, task assignment, process authorization and role-based access control. OMM not only enables large enterprises to take command of their various resources, but also allows employees, business partners, vendors and even customers to truly collaborate and interact with one another over an expanding and self-maintained communication network. A prototype of OMM has been developed and tested against a real operating environment, namely Hitachi America, which has a total of 6,000 employees distributed in several cities of the United States. The flexibility of OMM is further demonstrated by modifying the said prototype to obtain a new prototype, called OMM/PS (Publish-andSubscribe) to support PS in an e-commerce environment. This research prototype is used to enable an Internet-based commercial insurance company, called InsurePoint, to conduct interactive e-commerce on the Web. In Remembrance of My Parents Chung-Yin and Tak-Ying Ho Cheng