Nani's Goal Analysis Blog

Hi colleagues of the class of Goal Analysis, Professor Renata S. S. Guizzardi, and other interested fellows,

Today I am going to talk a bit about the importance of Herbert A. Simon's paper "On the Concept of Organizational Goal" (reference at the end on the text).

Goal analysis has been an important research topic since the early 90's, with the works of Dardenne, Lamswerde and others which led to KAOS framework. A first paradigm shift occured when Yu at the middle of that same decade presented his PhD research, approaching a method which regarded goals as social entities and their modeling a way to elicit agents' collaborative behavior and dependencies. This line of investigation is very active until today, as well as the i* language and framework, also paving the pass  to new approaches, like Tropos, which has been driven by John Mylopoulos and several research teams around the world (Toronto, Trento, and Recife in Brazil, to cite a few). These methods hasn been used to model Information Systems as well as enterprise modeling.

Given this scenario, we can understand how awesome is what Dr. Simon has undertaken investigating about the concept of organizational goal in 1964. Dr. Simon has received a lot of awards is his professional and scientific life (Turing Award, Nobel Prize in Economics, John von Neumann Theory Prize, IJCAI Award for Research Excellence, National Medal of Science for Behavioral and Social Science). 

For today, I hope to have given a picture of what is the work I will discuss  with you guys tomorrow .

An auto-biography of Dr. Simon can be found here.

Thank you guys for your time reading this.

Reference

Simon, H.A. (1964) On the concept of organizational goal. Administrative Science Quarterly 9, 1 22. In Wadia (1968).