Informing Enterprise Knowledge Graphs with a Work System Perspective

Abstract

The Work System Theory (WST) is a foundation theory that enables analysis of systems in organizations. It encompasses a set of concepts that help describing, analyzing, designing and evaluating purposeful systems that perform work. A WST-based method guides a work system’s analysis through the identification of problems/opportunities, summarizing the As-Is and To-Be versions of a system. Motivated by a Design Science project running in an academic institution, we explore in this paper the application of graph-based semantic technologies to specify and analyze work systems and to bridge their design-time view with run-time data found in legacy systems. Our contribution is twofold (1) we propose an ontological schema that informs RDF-based knowledge graph building with a Work System perspective; (2) we demonstrate some benefits of having work systems represented as Knowledge Graphs that are linked to operational data and further subjected to semantic queries and deductive reasoning. The Design Science artifact is iteratively developed in the host institution of the first authors and builds on previous development of a knowledge graph that has been lifted from legacy databases. The graph-based approach is viable to bridge an inherent conceptual gap between the work systems conceptualization and operational data schemas, thus adding value both to decision-making and to run-time systems that will be later built to benefit from the semantic distinctions present in the resulting graph.