Prototyping In Organizational Process Engineering

Organizations are increasingly developing new forms of integration. With the support of Organizational Design and Engineering - a new perspective on pursuing organizational effectiveness - it is now possible to attain new forms of competitive advantage through organizational changes whose outcomes are more easily predictable than in the past. To enable these changes we propose to intervene on organizational processes, considered by many scholars a convenient level of analysis. This paper aims to suggest which are the appropriate techniques to prototype the different components of a process. To this intent, we classify processes according to three analytical dimensions and then we propose the use of Discrete Event Simulation for Operational processes, of System Dynamics for Behavioral processes and of Agent Based Modeling for Change processes. This analytical classification favors the comparison of the different techniques and their uses We argue that, in complex situations, several techniques should be simultaneously employed.