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OV-4 Template

Product Definition. The Organizational Relationships Chart illustrates the command structure or relationships (as opposed to relationships with respect to a business process flow) among human roles, organizations, or organization types that are the key pla yers in an architecture.

Product Purpose. This product clarifies the various relationships that can exist between organizations and sub-organizations within the architecture and between internal and external organizations.

Product Detailed Description. OV-4 illustrates the relationships among organizations or resources in an architecture. These relationships can include supervisory reporting, command and control relationships, and command-subordinate relationships. Another type of relationship is a coordination relationship between equals, where two organizations coordinate or collaborate without one having a supervisory or command relationship over the other. Others may be defined depending on the purpose of the architecture. Architects should feel free to define any kinds of relationships necessary and important within their architecture to support the goals of the architecture. For example, dynamic teams or task forces (i.e., new operational nodes) may be created in real time with only limited lifespans and assigned missions, and could have needlines assigned to them. The creating node and the created node have a unique relationship that should be documented. This relationship may not be one of lines of command or organizational hierarchies, as these do not necessarily map to the needlines of OV-2. In this product, the dynamic organizations represented by operational nodes in OV-2 have a limited lifespan and a temporary collaboration relationship.

The product illustrates the relationships among organizations or organization types that are the key players in an architecture. These key players correspond to the operational nodes of an OV-2, which contains added detail on how the key players interact together in order to conduct their corresponding operational activities of OV-5.

Human roles whose skills are needed to perform the operational activities or business processes described in the architecture may also be defined in OV-4. The corresponding operational activities should be decomposed to a degree that allows them to be correlated to specific human roles within organizations. In addition, and specifically in the case of target architectures, human roles that do not reflect a specific supervisory reporting, command and control, or coordination organizational structure may be used in OV-4. In this case, OV-4 may be developed using strictly human roles that are the key players in an architecture.

Organizational relationships are important to depict in an OV (for a current architecture), because they can illustrate fundamental human roles (e.g., who or what type of skill is needed to conduct operational activities) as well as management relationships (e.g., command structure or relationship to other key players). Also, organizational relationships may influence how the operational nodes in an OV-2 are connected.