Overview Organizational Chart notation

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An ‘Organizational chart’ (Org chart) is a typical way of representing organizational structures of a company or organization. The ARIS Basic edition supports the modeling of Org charts with its model type ‘Organizational chart’. With the relevant ARIS symbols (organizational unit, role, and person), relationships between individual units like employees or departments are illustrated.

The most common organizational chart constructs are similar to a family tree. 

A simple organizational chart may look as follows:

Example of an organizational chart

Figure 1: Example of an organizational chart

The relationships between the objects stand for:

  • Who is responsible for whom?
  • Who is superior or inferior?
  • What communication channels exist?

An organizational chart represents important roles of the organization, visible for all and clearly arranged. The management and the employees use the chart as a reference for internal and external communication.

Organizational chart symbols

Organizational Unit

Organizational unit: Unit in an organizational hierarchy, e.g., department or location. It can be used to show which organizational units are superior to others and it can be assigned to roles and persons.

Position: The smallest organizational unit in a company is a position. It is assigned to employees (persons).

Role: Defines tasks, properties, and privileges of a person. It is independent of a specific person. A role can be assigned to multiple persons.

Person: Specific person who assumes a role and can be assigned to an organizational unit. A person usually represents an existing employee within the organization.

Location: A Location can be a factory, a building, or also an office or an individual workstation in a room. Location refers to a physical place.

 

Example of an organizational chart

The following example shows an organizational chart of the German government as of August 2009.  You can also use the video tutorials provided to find an easy way into the world of ARIS.

Example of an organizational chart

Let's start modeling Organizational charts!

From here you can start to learn modeling an organizational chart with ARIS Basic. The required steps are: Get your ARIS for free, have a look at some video tutorials, start modeling, share your models and discuss them with other users, and if you haven't joined ARIS Community yet, do it now! ;-)

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