Modeling Organizations: Methods Used by Real-World Designers

representation of organizational behavior amenable to simulation, generation of design alternatives, etc. The task of RWD is to generate a concrete, workable design that will address specific problems in a specific organization. In pursing RWD, designers have access to, and are influenced by, a rich set of organizationspecific knowledge (e.g., culture, standard practice, knowledge of individual idiosyncrasies). What might be considered extraneous issues from a COD perspective are kept at the forefront of the RWD task. For instance, some real-world designers tend to ignore certain organizational features that might embarrass or offend) Thus real-world design is more deeply embedded in the rich, complex and often unprogrammable world that sociologists with a penchant for neologism call "everyday life." This embeddedness has two implications that differentiate RWD from COD: First, since RWD is embedded in an organizational context, realworld designers have access to knowledge that helps them get around tricky modeling problems-they thus have a leg up on the more abstract and formalistic COD designers. Second,and formalistic COD designers. Second, however, this same access sometimes leads realworld designers to generate models that are more influenced by the context of the design task than Business, Stanford University, 1992; and "’Seeing the Elephant’: A Grounded Theory of the Role of Knowledge Interests in Business Process Reengineering," unpublished manuscript, submitted to the 1994 Academy of Management meetings. 3 See Borys, 1992, op cit.