A Design Evaluation of an Extension to the DEMO Methodology

The Design and Engineering Method for Organisations (DEMO) is the principal methodology in Enterprise Engineering (EE). It assists in making so-called essential models of organisations, which are highly abstracted ontological models. Many essential models have been produced in practice, of very different kinds of organisations, and the expressions of these models in diagrams and tables have been presented to various types of stakeholders. It turns out that the ease to understand the models varies significantly, depend on existing knowledge, background and need of the stakeholders. As a consequence, the acceptance of the essential model by these organisations also varies significantly. In this paper, the results of an analysis of the model and model content of five successive iterations are presented and discussed. This has given rise to proposing an extension to the applied OER method (Organisational Essence Revealing), such that the different kinds and levels of foreknowledge among the stakeholders can be accommodated. An iteration of this extension is also briefly presented.