Design & Engineering Methodology for Organizations

Design & Engineering Methodology for Organizations (DEMO) is an enterprise modelling methodology for transaction modelling, and analysing and representing business processes. It is developed since the 1980s by Jan Dietz and others, and is inspired by the language/action perspective

DEMO is a methodology for designing, organizing and linking organizations. Central concept is the "communicative action": communication is considered essential for the functioning of organizations. Agreements between employees, customers and suppliers are indeed created to communicate. The same is true for the acceptance of the results supplied.

The DEMO methodology is based on the following principles:

The DEMO methodology provides a coherent understanding of communication, information, action and organization. The scope is here shifted from "Information Systems Engineering" to "Business Systems Engineering", with a clear understanding of both the information and the central organizations.

The DEMO methodology is inspired on the language/action perspective, which was initially developed as a philosophy of language by J. L. Austin, John Searle and Jürgen Habermas and was built on the speech act theory. The language/action perspective was introduced in the field of computer science and information systems design by Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd in the 1980s. According to Dignum and Dietz (1997) this concept has "proven to be a new basic paradigm for Information Systems Design. In contrast to traditional views of data flow, the language/action perspective emphasizes what people do while communicating, how they create a common reality by means of language, and how communication brings about a coordination of their activities."

DEMO is developed at the Delft University of Technology by Jan Dietz in the early 1990s, and originally stood for "Dynamic Essential Modelling of Organizations". It builds on the Language Action Perspective (LAP), which is derived from the work include John Austin, John Searle and Jürgen Habermas since the 1960s. It is linked to the "Natural language Information Analysis Method" (NIAM) developed by Shir Nijssen, and object-role modeling (ORM) further developed by Terry Halpin.

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