Hypothetical Reasoning Over Databases

Abstract

In recent years, the term agile organisation has been coined to denote an organisation which is able to change its working practices quickly in order to adapt to changing external pressures or to take advantage of new market opportunities that may arise (Perez-Bustamante, 1999). A key element of such agility is fast and reliable decision making; that is, the ability to determine what the new organisational behaviour shall be, as well as how the changes to it should be affected. In general, an organisation will be faced with several possible strategies for change, each of which has competing strengths and weaknesses. Management must then evaluate and compare each of these to determine which has the best forecasted outcome. This process is often referred to as “what if?” analysis (WiA), since it tries to answer the question: what will the outcome be if we adopt change X? (Codd, Codd, & Salley, 1993)