Validation of DEMO’s Conciseness Quality and Proposal of Improvements to the Process Model

The Design and Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) comprises a set of models and diagrams to represent an organization. While applying DEMO on a project in collaboration with the town council of the city of Funchal, we saw a need for improvements in the Process Model. Thus, in this paper we propose improvements to the current body of knowledge regarding DEMO’s Process Model representations, fusing the contents of the Process and Cooperation models. Namely, we propose a semantically richer Process Diagram and a Transaction Description Table, to achieve a more agile and comprehensive solution to depict the essence of organizational reality. Our approach presents the information in a more straightforward and transparent way, which is easier to understand by collaborators. This project also confirmed the known DEMO conciseness metric of allowing a reduction of over 95% in the complexity of representations. One of our main research contributions is that, even though the information is more accessible and easier to grasp in the diagrams we propose, the processes’ complexity is still present in the description table.