Towards evidence based splitting of organizations

Abstract

The reported research program aims at finding and testing principles for adequately splitting organizations. Using actors from Enterprise Ontology as organization building blocks on one hand and criteria from organization science on the other hand, an expert-meeting was presented the organization-splitting choices for a part of the Dutch Agency of Public Works and Water Management. The experts could construct their own free-format (gut-feeling) organization choice and they could choose from predefined alternatives, based on the High Internal Cohesion/Low External Coupling criterion and calculated using the min-cut algorithm from graph-theory. The gut-feeling alternative appeared to be close to the (non-trivial) calculated organization alternative, with separation of functions as main reason for difference. Also, business service dependencies appeared to determine organization-splitting far more dominantly than information dependencies. © 2007 International Federation for Information Processing.