Towards Modelling and Simulation of Organisational Routines

Organisational routines are repetitive, recognisable patterns of interdependent action by human and digital actors to accomplish tasks. Routine Dynamics is a theoretical base that informs discussion and analysis of such routines. We note that there is a knowledge gap in the literature on organisational routines to consolidate the constructs and ontologies of routines into an abstract data model. In this paper, we design and implement a data model of routines using the Unified Modelling Language. We present a demonstration to illustrate our data model’s use, and how one can then use instantiations of the model to analyse and simulate organisational routines based on real-world data. This example examines recurrent patterns of action inferred from data in the GitHub issue tracking system about the open-source software project, scikit-learn. Our study extends the theoretical/empirical understanding and knowledge base of Routine Dynamics by laying the groundwork towards examining organisational routines from a model-driven perspective that gives rise to simulating the dynamics of routines.