Constraint-based Analysis and Design of Organizations

The ACTION organization design and analysis system is a research and development effort designed to assist business re-engineering and organizational or technology change by helping to improve the integration of technology, organizations, and people ("TOP-integration") in manufacturing enterprises. ACTION uses a multi-level constraintbased representation of organizational features including business objectives, unit structure, skills needed, performance monitoring/reward systems, decisionmaking discretion, employee values, coordination attributes, etc. to both evaluate existing organization designs and to help users develop new ones. ACTION’s core sol, ware is domainindependent, theory-driven architecture designed for application to a wide range of design and analysis problems.