DESIGN OPERATORS TO SUPPORT ORGANIZATIONAL DESIGN CATHOLIJN M. JONKER Division Cognitive Engineering, Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information,University of Nijmegen, Montessorilaan 3, 6525 HR Nijmegen, The Netherlands ALEXEI SHARPANSKYKH, JAN TREUR Department of Artificial Intelligence, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, De Boelelaan 1081a, NL-1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands and PINAR YOLUM Department of Computer Engineering, Bogazici University, TR-34342 Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey Abstract. Organizational design is an important topic in the literature on organizations. Usually the design principles are addressed informally in this literature. This paper makes a first attempt to formally introduce design operators to formalize the design steps in the process of designing organizations. These operators help an organization designer create an organization design from scratch as well as offer the possibility to revise existing designs of organizations. The operators offer both top-down refinements and bottom-up grouping options. Importantly, the operators can be combined into complex operators that can serve as patterns for larger steps in an organization design process. The usability of the design operators is demonstrated in a running example. The contribution of this paper provides a solid basis for the development of a software environment supporting interactive organization design processes. This is demonstrated by an implemented prototype example tool. 1. Introduction Organizations play a key role in the modern society. The welfare of the society as a whole depends upon the effectiveness, efficiency and viability of organizations. Organizational structures and processes are studied in social sciences, where organizational design is a special topic. Organization