07/07/2021

Alfonso Díez, CEO UGROUND, and Juan de Lara, Professor at the Autonomous University of Madrid, researcher in software engineering, discuss the digital transformation of the company through the Organizational Digital Twins (DTO).

Applied to organizational models, the DTO is a new tool to address, technically and functionally, business digitalization projects overcoming the barriers of conventional technologies.

Discover now its properties and technical characteristics, its applicability to digital transformation through the analysis and orchestration of business processes and the integration of all actors and technologies. And how through the creation of transversal value chains we can turn organizations into agile and adaptive ecosystems, following the conceptual model that should guide us into the future.

Abstract. Semantic-based Digital Twins can be applied to the enactment of the digital counterparts of enterprises and organizations, and not only for physical devices or machines. Digital Twins for Organizations have a profound impact in the architecture of corporate management platforms, in the design of business processes and in the conception of information and technological ecosystems.. This work condenses our experience in the creation of Digital Twins for Organizations, using model-driven engineering based on semantic modeling. We will describe their more relevant characterizations and discuss their potential impact in their business implementations.

Keywords: Digital Twins for Organizations, Digital Twins, Model Driven Engineering, Semantic Engineering, Semantic Digital Twins, Digital Transformation, Digitalization, Enactive Systems

Introduction

The idea of Digital Twins (DTs) belongs to the world of Digital Transformation. This is the transformation of the economy and society to a new paradigm, where digital means are pervasive. This paper distils our experience at UGROUND GLOBAL with the concept of DTs for organizations (DTOs), characterizing their essential elements, and discussing their potential impact. We started our theoretical work and implementation of solutions for digitalization from the point of view of Model-driven Engineering (MDE), using semantic approaches and interpretation of models. Soon we found a more complex need: large organizations require complex and evolutive solutions to cover many domains of their operations, which is not possible with the conventional approach of niche software applications that has dominated the market. We realized that we were searching for DTs of entire enterprises, and that this idea could not be fulfilled if we think that digitalization of organizations is a matter of piling more and more conventional applications. Digitalization, digital transformation and DTOs are interlaced concepts that suggest a new challenge: the development of universal platforms configured using semantic modelling to create DTs of arbitrary large organizations. These platforms are not yet another application, but a class of meta applications that can represent many different views of reality and evolve very fast, interacting with real objects, people and other technologies. Such interaction between the DT and the reality it represents is dialectic, each one changing the other, in search of an impossible equilibrium. These universal and non-deterministic views are currently missing in current views of the DT as the digital simulation of the real organization. In the rest of this paper our aim is introducing such novel view of DTOs.

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